Archive for category: News

There will be no refuse, food waste, and recycling collections on Christmas Day, Boxing Day, and New Years Day, meaning there will be some changes to your regular collection schedule.

All collections will be carried out according to your collection calendar. If you need a new one you can download it from www.environmentfirst.co.uk.

Collection calendars for 2025 are also now available, and can be downloaded from www.environmentfirst.co.uk. There is now an option to download reminders directly to your smartphone calendar!

Changes to other collections

• Clinical or sharps collections will be collected on Tuesday 24 and Tuesday 31 December due to the bank holidays.
• Bulky waste collections will be suspended from Monday 23 December until Monday 6 January 2025.
• Garden waste collections will be suspended from Monday 23 December for 4 weeks, resuming on Monday 20 January 2025.

Lewes District Local Plan consultation set for New Year launch

Residents across Lewes district are being encouraged to take part in the latest stage of consultation on Lewes District Council’s Local Plan.

Local plans set out where future development will take place, such as new homes and locations for business growth, as well the local policy requirements against which future planning applications will be judged.

A first phase of consultation that will run from week commencing January 6 to February 28 2025. Phase one of the consultation is on the detailed policies for the plan area and will consider sites within towns and a limited number of villages. The second phase will take place later in 2025 and have a greater emphasis on more rural parts of the district, while also re-evaluating areas considered during phase one.

Residents will be able to choose from a range of different ways to engage with the consultation. This will include an online webinar that will take place early in the New Year and a series of in-person drop-in events that will begin towards the end of January 2025.

Ahead of the consultation, Lewes District Council is running a short survey to find out about local people’s understanding of what a Local Plan is. The council will use what people say through the survey to help shape its future communications about the Local Plan. The survey, which will stay open until 5pm on Tuesday 31 December 2024, also gives respondents the opportunity to join the council’s Local Plan mailing list.

For more information about the Local Plan consultation, and to complete the short survey, visit

www.lewes-eastbourne.gov.uk/Lewes-Local-Plan

While we work hard to cut storm overflows across our region, as set out in our £1.5bn Clean Rivers and Seas Plan, it is key that communities can view information on all our storm overflow activity.

From 13 November 2024, our new Rivers and Seas Watch service replaced the Beachbuoy online monitoring tool.

Rivers and Seas Watch now includes all of our storm overflows including those inland, not just our coastal overflows.

Rivers and Seas Watch has been running in beta mode on our website since June. During this time, we collected feedback from users, including Beachbuoy subscribers, campaign groups and local stakeholders, to ensure Rivers and Seas Watch provides relevant information in an easy to read format. Technology experts also fed into our Beachbuoy Independent Review.

Key features of Rivers and Seas Watch include:

• Enhanced user experience across different devices (mobile, laptop, desktop), making it easier to find a location, and access and understand information
• Comprehensive and accessible information on how the service works
• An industry-leading mapping platform, presenting information in a clean and timely way
• Improved email notifications, including start times, impact times and the release status
• Integration with our overall plans to cut storm overflows, to help users understand what improvements are planned in each area

Improving how we communicate this important information to the public in a transparent, accurate and timely way is crucial. Rivers and Seas Watch has been created following a customer-first approach, engaging extensively with our community to understand their needs, wants and feedback from Beachbuoy.

Users can sign up for alerts for their local beaches on Rivers and Seas Watch, as data protection rules mean we cannot carry previous Beachbuoy users over.

A new survey is set to reveal how prepared Sussex residents are for emergencies. The survey https://sussexpolice.welcomesyourfeedback.net/srf aims to identify current levels of risk awareness and preparedness across the county. The results will be used to ensure residents have the information they need to help them become more resilient. The top risks that Sussex faces, including flooding, wildfires and utilities disruption, are contained in the Community Risk Register for Sussex, which provides an assessment of how likely these risks are to happen and the impacts if they do, so that local people can be better prepared in their homes, communities and businesses. The Community Risk Register is produced by the Sussex Resilience Forum (SRF), whose membership covers the Sussex Police force area and includes the emergency services, local authorities, Environment Agency, health agencies, and voluntary and private sector organisations such as utility companies. The SRF provides a formal structure for these organisations to work together, to identify potential risks and produce and test emergency plans to either prevent or reduce the impact of any incident on local communities. Commenting on the launch of the Local Risk Perception Survey, SRF Chair Assistant Chief Constable Steve Rayland, Sussex Police, said: “I urge residents to complete the local risk perception survey and share their views with us. The responses will help us identify what further support and information our communities require so that we can help them to be more resilient.” Please click here to complete the survey. It will only take 5 minutes to complete. If you need any support to complete the survey please contact: SussexResilienceForum@sussex.police.uk.