A few words from the chair Following on from my previous photo of the Bristol channel from Redcliffe Bay I was going to write an article about the little ships, aka those brave little tugs which come out in all weather conditions to escort large ships in to the Avonmouth and Royal Portbury Docks, including the occasional cruise liner. Anyway here’s one of the MSC Hong Kong container vessel escorted by four tugs (you can see only three in the photo – fore, aft and one alongside) which had come out to meet it passing Battery Point, an historic gun emplacement last used during WWII to protect Portishead, which is the closest point anywhere in the UK that large vessels pass. Standing on Battery Point it seems so near passing through the deep channel close to a little unmanned lighthouse above jagged rocks that you feel you can almost reach out and touch it.
Anyway, back to business, I’ve got some important updates to mention which came out of our last group get-together at the Toby Carvery in Almondsbury on 13th June. This was a well-attended meeting with over a dozen of us present including Julian Hardenberg a committee member from Bath and District to discuss a possible merger with Bristol so that its members could continue to be represented by an enlarged Bristol-Bath group following the difficult decision that Bath had taken to close. This was duly agreed by Bristol Group members and subsequently confirmed at the Bath and District AGM held on 18th June chaired by Alf Riley. Head Office have been informed and work is now in progress to move Bath’s membership over to Bristol, to close the group’s bank account and transfer the balance of funds to Bristol. Hopefully, this will be done before CSPA’s AGM in Kenilworth
on 9/10th October, so that in our autumn newsletter we can confirm that the merger is complete. In the interim, pending next year’s Group AGM, it is likely that myself as Chair, Martin Robertson as Group Secretary and Colin Fender as Treasurer/Membership Secretary plus others on the Bristol committee will provide the committee for the enlarged Bristol Bath Group with an open invitation for Bath committee members to join the committee if they wish.
Moving on to the main purpose of the meeting this was to discuss the nominations, motions and constitutional amendments to submit to Head Office in preparation for the Kenilworth AGM in October. First, it was agreed that Les Calder our SW Regional Representative should be put forward for the positions of NEC Chair and Vice Chair, the position of Chair becoming vacant and the position of Vice Chair to be contested as a fallback. It was also agreed that I should be put forward as one of the five NEC members, two of which are reserved for a woman, with one of the remaining three positions expected to become vacant. We then moved on to discuss motions and agreed that three should be put forward covering a) the possible phasing out of National Insurance Contributions (NICs) which is the bedrock of the State Retirement Pension to receive as of right without means-testing; b) introducing a taper to Pension Credit eligibility so that pensioners do not face a cliff edge cut-off between entitlement and non-entitlement should their income exceed by just one penny the income limit; and c) making it mandatory on government departments, large companies selling retail goods or services, or public utilities to provide an easily accessible customer services telephone number on websites, correspondence etc, that will be responded to quickly in
order to resolve customer queries or complaints. Finally, we agreed to submit two constitutional amendments: a) to encourage mergers between English regional groups which express a wish to do so and assimilate members who have no active group to represent them so that members can be represented more effectively; and b) to introduce a rule change to make it easier for individual members not represented by active groups to nominate themselves or others to fill vacant NEC posts and to submit motions for debate and adoption at the AGM. Of course we have already made a start on some of this by assimilating WestonSuper-Mare last year and now beginning a merger with Bath to form an enlarged BristolBath group, but it needs more encouragement from the centre to address a declining membership and groups closing (our current membership including WsM as at June 2024 is 511 but this likely to increase to around 1250 and a bank balance of around £3000 with the addition of Bath).
Finally, finally, we now have a new government administration led by Labour so what does this portend for the Triple Lock guarantee introduced by the Conservative-led coalition with the Liberal Democrats in 2010? On the face of it we should feel reassured, Labour have committed to maintaining the Triple Lock guarantee to increase state retirement pension payments each year in line with inflation, average earnings, or by 2.5% – whichever is the highest. But we should be wary, this commitment was given only very late in the election campaign and so at some point it could be revisited as part of a wide-ranging “review of the pensions landscape”. So this is not to alarm anyone but to flag it as a possible issue of which I am sure CSPA Head Office are aware.
Anyway, enough from me, so over to Colin and Martin …
Our Treasurer has noted that the CSPA website has an article, several pages long, on the topic of pensioner income tax payers, particularly those who are now taxed on their State Pensions. If you can’t access the article drop me an email of a phone message and I’ll get a copy to you.
A Journey through Pomerania travelling by river boat in June 2024: Our journey began in Potsdam a city just to the west of Berlin, itself a very attractive city which had until 1989 been under the German Democratic Republic (aka East Germany). We travelled via the Havel – Oder canal system
built for heavy goods barge traffic. Like all canals we went through locks but the biggest ‘lift’ – 36 metres – was at the Niederfinow ship lift, the second highest in Germany which was quite a spectacle, especially from the ground. The aerial view shows the new, wider ship lift for even heavier barges opened a few years ago. The old lift built in 1934 is still use for smaller vessels but is soon to become a heritage building.
Pictured also the scale of our tour group compared with the new lift. Our next stop was in the (now) Polish city of Szczecin – prewar Stettin in Prussian Germany. A city rebuilt from the ruins of WW2 with a fine view from the river Oder. The city boasts one the oldest working clocks which has been
renovated twice. During the journey through the Oder estuary and its various branches we were able to admire many tens of herons, hundreds of cormorants and a whitetailed fish eagle. We had not anticipated seeing so much bird life alongside the river. The ship then moved to the German Baltic coast and its many islands with the obligatory trips to the nice sandy beaches. After which we moved on to the island (and village) of Peenemunde where we docked. The site was (in and before WW2) the German Research and development centre of the terror weapons, the V1 – winged flying bomb and V2 rocket the precursor to the ICBMs of today.
We saw the fine Baltic Sea beaches, walked along a couple of piers and overlooked the high chalk cliffs of Rugen Island at the heritage centre in the north of the island. A short note on the digital switchover 2025 will see BT turn off its ageing analogue network for good as the UK embraces a fully digital network. The transition is already well underway – as soon as this year, BT will stop selling analogue lines. It’s also worth noting 2025 is the year when all UK mobile 3G services will start being switched off although it won’t affect voice and text calls from your mobile phones – only the 3G data if you use it for sending photos, viewing maps, reading the news or streaming music while on the move. 4G / 5G services are unaffected.
BT are switching off the analogue network because they can no longer maintain it reliably – the replacement parts for exchanges and so on are simply no longer manufactured. In recent months most of you will have seen armies of Openreach engineers climbing telegraph poles and poking their heads into the green roadside cabinets in your neighbourhood to prepare for the switchover. One consequence for everyone is that in the event of a local power cut the phone service will be lost after one hour on BT networks, possibly less on other networks such as Virgin Media. My advice, if you are worried, is to ensure you have a mobile phone to hand and that you have adequate coverage in your home. For most subscribers the switchover will go un-noticed as all the necessary rewiring is usually done outside the customer’s premises, but for a few people there are issues especially for those who rely on alarms and health monitoring (telecare) systems, or in rare instances those still using very old (rotary) style handsets. By the way, the switch off of 3G service on mobiles I mentioned may also affect some telecare systems. If you or your vulnerable relatives are users of any of these systems contact BT now to seek their advice – there are too many different devices out there to provide reliable recommendations but BT know they have a duty to ensure users are not left high and dry. There’s no fixed date for the switchover – it will happen district by district when BT have made all their preparations and you may not get any warning. Unfortunately, there are already reports of failed alarm calls resulting in fatalities where the user was not aware of the switchover and their equipment had not been changed, so don’t delay if you have any doubts.
Many thanks to Stuart and Colin for providing the first two articles in this newsletter.
Travels with a Civil Servant will resume in a future issue…
REMINDER of future all group member meeting dates:
Thursday September 13th at the Toby carvery -11.00am – followed by lunch
Thursday December 12th at the Toby carvery -11.00am – followed by lunch
And finally the Annual CSPA Conference will be on Wednesday 9th and Thursday 10th
October at Kenilworth.
___________________________________________________________________
Footnote:
Chair/Newsletter Editor, Stuart Tarr: 5 St Augustine’s Close, Portishead, Bristol BS20
8JH. Tel: 01275 568847, Mobile 07769 640770, Email: stuart.tarr@hotmail.co.uk
Group Secretary, Martin Robertson: 6 Beech Road, Yatton, Bristol , BS49 4HY. Mobile:
07962 827937, Email: martin@mjlrobertson.org.uk
Hon Treasurer/Membership Secretary, Colin Fender: Tel: 0117 969 4752
Email colinfender@btinternet.com
