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June 2021
PARISH COUNCIL ANNUAL REPORT 2021

It is customary at the Annual Parish Meeting for the Chairman to give a report on
the activities undertaken by the Council over the past year. This past year, and
indeed this meeting have been very different from anything we have previously
known.
Our year has been dominated by COVID, and, even as we slowly move back to
some sort of normality, this meeting, being held electronically as it is, is still
affected by the pandemic.
For sure, some of the functions of the Parish Council have continued much as
normal, despite the fact we have been unable to meet face to face. Planning
applications have been perused and commented on; the Lengthsman’s work on
our open spaces hasn’t stopped; the office functions supervised by our clerk have
continued, but Council activities such as Salt and Pepper, and Communibus
stopped dead with the first lockdown.
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The focus of our year, inevitably, has been COVID. On Friday, 13 March 2020 the
situation was looking sufficiently serious that the Parish Council convened a
meeting that brought together representatives of the School, Pop In Place, WI, the
Church, the Surgery, Scouts and the Sports Club to discuss and agree a
community wide response. Out of that meeting emerged BereConnect, the
posters which were distributed to all households with emergency contact
numbers and advice, the food bank, our volunteer response, the Emergency
Fund and much else.
I would like to pay tribute here to the extraordinary commitment given by
Councillor Brenda House to mobilising and managing our volunteers.
BereConnect volunteers originally numbered over fifty people. As the need for
voluntary help became clearer this settled down to a core group of about 20
people, mostly from our NeighbourCar scheme, who provided, and continue to
provide, an invaluable service in delivering prescriptions from the surgery to the
housebound, and by driving residents to hospital appointments as necessary.
Latterly these drivers have taken on the task of getting people to and from
vaccine clinics.
We originally thought that many volunteers would be needed to undertake
shopping trips for residents who were shielding, but in the event, many of these
tasks were taken up by Dorset Council delivering food parcels, and by relatives,
friends and neighbours stepping in to give help.
Some of the BereConnect volunteers found themselves in a new role by providing
a ‘Buddy’ link to isolated residents who valued the human contact of an
occasional chat on the phone.

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