Malpas Community Web

Being a bit demob happy after having completed my 2 year stint as the Chair of Malpas Parish Council, an idea popped into my head recently which we may live to regret. Until next January, as far as practicably possible, my fiancée Joyce and I have decided to source everything we need from within our local area. I have nervously accepted the challenge of writing up the experience every week.

There are a few reasons for this apparent lapse of sanity. We hope to promote the great local businesses that help make South Cheshire a wonderful place to live. If there’s something we can’t get, then that could highlight gaps in the market, which someone might choose to fill. It should also reduce our carbon footprint and improve our quality of life. We also hope it will demonstrate the Malpas Biznet idea of the money-go-round.

I would love to claim I coined the phrase, but I think the credit goes to either Jerry Brunning or Steve Farmer at i7 (although some lazy Google research reveals a 1970s Kinks’ album called “Lola Versus Powerman and the Moneygoround” which makes me like it even more). The rather attractive idea is that the money in the local area should circulate between ourselves. Hopping down to Tesco’s in Whitchurch, nice as they are down there, only really benefits the staff and shareholders of Tesco and the money flows out of the area. So it’s goodbye to the £9 meal deals and hello to friendly local shops who know you by name and will have a chat while they’re bagging up your groceries.

“Ooo that’s going to be expensive!” was a fairly common reaction from people we talked to, or simply “You’re going to struggle”. I’m a bit more optimistic, but part of this venture is to answer some questions. The most important of which is “is it actually more expensive?” A 10 mile round trip to Whitchurch immediately adds £4 of fuel before we have bought our first pint of milk. Wrexham adds a £9.60p premium not including parking and Chester comes in at a whooping £12. So even if we accept the premise that local shops are more expensive (which I’m pretty sure they’re not), we’d have to make some pretty big savings to justify the cost of travel vs. walking out of our front door.

We have drawn up a few rules: Ordering from the internet is cheating, unless the business originates within the ‘zone’. We are very keen this isn’t seen as some way of eliciting special treatment; so if we are offered deals, they must be available to everyone. There are 3 lifelines for buying outside the area – so if we do run out of underwear or something absolutely essential, we do not have to knit our own – these will hopefully be last resorts. There is currently nowhere to source fuel from the area, and because of the shear soaring price of the stuff, we are reserving the right to get it where ever it is cheapest. Similarly I am not going to prejudice the interests of my business, so the company is free to get the best deal it can – although I am quietly confident I can get most of what I need locally. There will be no paying friends to nip down to Whitchurch on our behalf. Later in the summer we’ll be taking a holiday. I was rather saddened to hear someone from Cornwall on the radio a few weeks ago, bemoaning the supermarkets down there for similar money-go-round reasons – the tourist buck is flying out of the local economy. So we’ll be eschewing chains wherever we go, but it’s obviously impractical to ship my G&T’s to whichever sand bar we end up at.

I’ve never written a blog before and I’m terrified we will run out of things to say, or worse, bore the readers. So if anyone has any ideas for things to include, please contact me. This will all be my own personal, probably idiosyncratic outlook and shouldn’t be taken as representing the Parish Council, Biznet or anyone else. We might start with little profiles of businesses each week, the odd recipe here and there, appeals for help sourcing things (might be pleadings actually) and general musings.

So that’s us; at the mercy of South Cheshire for the foreseeable future. It is going to be a bit of an adventure……

Russ McGinn