Herefordshire Council by-election profile: Newton Farm ward

Voters in Newton Farm, Hereford, will have the chance to elect their representative on Herefordshire Council next month.

The by-election was triggered after the death of True Independents councillor Bernard Hunt in October last year.

He was elected to represent the ward in 2019 and won the seat by 171.

The seat has struggled with low voter turn out in recent years. With only 19 per cent of those eligible turned up to vote.

This time, there is strong competition to take up the council seat.

A total of seven candidates are vying for the county council ward.

Parts of the ward featured among the most deprived areas in the UK in a council report last year.

The then councillor for the ward Bernard Hunt said local people felt overlooked by the authorities when it came to tackling issues such as crime and improving access for local people to housing.

But a real pillar of the community are local volunteers.

Newton Farm Community Association, an independent charity which was set up in 1999, has made a real difference in tackling social isolation and providing guidance for locals.

It also offers affordable goods to everyone by running a charity shop.

Former councillor Phil Edwards, who represented Newton Farm from 2015 to 2019, says the area has improved dramatically over recent years.

He says housing developments and the opportunity for more local residents to become home owners has changed the community for the better. Sports clubs are playing a vital role in the community too.

“A lot has been done in a relative short space of time with the new development. Two-hundred-and-fifty homes were bulldozed and 267 were built,” he said.

“It had taken an awful long time to put the money together to make that happen.

“The only way it could happen was with a token sum from central government, a large sum from Keepmoat developers and Herefordshire Council, who offered up some of the additional land.

“It was a rapidly changing world. That in itself made a huge difference to the Oval [a street of homes and shops] and its population. The old concrete tenements which were for people who should have been there temporarily for 13 weeks – some had been there for 13 years.

“They were in temporary housing and often they were troubled families who were struggling.

“The first sight of Hereford for people coming from Abergavenny would be the three-storey concrete apartments with dreadful condensation and misted windows.

“Poverty, to be frank, that’s what they saw – poverty.”

“But that has changed and the opportunity for people to buy and part-rent properties has changed the overall population of the area.

“The new developments were about a fifth of the housing in Newton Farm.

“That’s why I believe social levels and the approach to society have improved a lot.

“Then when the Belmont Wanderers were able to create the football pitches at the top of

Newton Farm, about 200 families subscribed for their boys and girls to go and play in football.

“They’ve taken on a 25-year lease of the council, the mowing and maintenance of the football ground.

“That gave the community a sense of ownership and responsibility.

“The creation of the Belmont and Haywood Country Park, the purchasing of the Belmont Pools and the important safety boardwalk around the pools all came to nearly £400,000 worth of community benefit and 18 acres of public land.

“And hundreds of people have used this publicly owned estate, and in particular during this difficult period of pandemic.”