Committee meeting synopsis

Meeting date: 20 April, 2018

GDPR

You may have come across these letters. They stand for ‘General Data Protection Regulation’ - new legislation, coming from Europe but which the government says it will retain after Brexit. This comes into force on 25 May, updating existing data protection laws. The main target is large organisations that hold sensitive personal information about you, but even organisations like ours have to follow the new ‘rules’. We will finalise the policy documents after we have attended a workshop in the first half of May where we hope to get professional advice to ensure we’re on the right track. Like everyone else, we have to tell you the basis on which we hold and process your personal information, and we have chosen to do this on the basis of ‘legitimate interests’: we interpret this to mean you have asked to be kept informed of walks and other activities, and in order to do this, we need your name and email address. We have also asked those of you coming on our walks to have a phone number to contact you in case of late changes to the arrangements. In all of these, we have always made it clear that we will use those details only for the purposes outlined, and we will not pass them on to anyone else unless we have your explicit permission to do so. We hold this information in a password protected spreadsheet, held on a computer which is also password protected. All collective emails are sent ‘blind copy’ so your email address is not visible to anyone else. As this is the basis on which we worked to date, we believe we do not need to ask you to opt in again, but this is something we will check at the workshop. In the meantime, if you do have any concerns about how we’re dealing with your information, please contact Ken

Publicity

We (mainly Catherine and Sue) have been monitoring and extending the locations where we have placed WaW ‘stickers’ - now up to 24 locations. Recently, Catherine has also been asking if they will take a batch of our walks guides, for which (thanks to Dereham Town Council) we have also been able to offer a leaflet holder: to date, 20 have accepted, so spreading the word more widely. In addition, many of those parishes outside Dereham through which one or more of our walks run, have taken a supply of packs, and/or put a link on their websites to our own. Most recently, North Elmham has told us they have given packs to a local group of walkers, the parish church in Worthing, the King’s Head Hotel (pub and good quality accommodation), the Teapost (café) and Post Office, and the parish church in Elmham. We are most grateful for those wonderful actions on our behalf.

Maintenance

We conducted a litter pick along 2 of our footpaths (FP11 and FP14), generating five bags of rubbish. There are a couple of other paths which need more heavy duty attention, and we are hoping for assistance on these. We have also once more had the input of The Conservation Volunteers on Restricted Byway 30 (runs from Northall Green to Swanton Road), this time cutting back encroaching trees and bushes, making it more easily possible to walk and cycle along here. We hope to agree more work with this splendid group in the near future.

Badley Moor

Those who came on our last walk will know that we had hoped to call in briefly at Badley Moor, common land open to the public, accessed off Footpath 26 (Dumpling Green) and FP35. We didn’t go there as we were confident it would be very wet underfoot. We will schedule this in before too long in the future. In the meantime, we are pleased to report that the landowner has finally installed a kissing gate (replacing a stile) as access to the Common. We and Open Spaces Society are very pleased about this, and will be issuing a press release soon.

Next walk

Now the main news. Our next walk is a Dereham circular, ending once more at The George, where we again have the reserved use of the conservatory. I don’t want to make a big thing out of it, but do need to point out that we will make a crossing of the A47 as a single carriageway at one point. I would anticipate that traffic will be lighter than at some times, but we will be taking extra care in escorting people across. It’s something that I (and others) do regularly, so I don’t expect any difficulty, but I am aware that some are wary of this.

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