Agenda item

(Cabinet Member with Special Responsibility Councillor Thomas)

Report of the Corporate Director (Regeneration). 

(Cabinet Member with Special Responsibility Councillor Thomas)

(It was noted that Councillors Archer, Ashworth and Kerr had previously declared a personal interest in the following item.)

The Corporate Director (Regeneration) submitted a report regarding the future of Morecambe’s Meteorological Station. 

The options, options analysis, including risk assessment and officer preferred option and comments, were set out in the report as follows:

Option 1 - Maintain the Existing Service

Maintaining the existing service will allow the continued collection of data from the morning readings taken throughout the year. Information could still be supplied to the Met Office and The Visitor. Information could also be supplied to internal services and members of the public on request. 

This option would provide a further opportunity in the future for the Met Office’s roll-out of automated stations. This would potentially automate the carrying out of the morning readings and might also allow the automation of the afternoon readings to reintroduce the ‘weather slot’ but this would all be subject to detailed discussions with the Met Office. 

This would require the ongoing budget of £1,500 p.a. in Planning Services and ongoing access to the staffing resources required to undertake the manual readings.  The City Council would have to finance the provision of an electrical supply for the automated equipment at a cost of approximately £800 p.a. although automation might reduce some of the ongoing staffing costs required for manual readings. It is possible therefore, that the cost for electrical supply will be contained within the existing budget. 

Option 2 – Extend the Existing Service

This option is to extend the service to reintroduce the afternoon readings in order to try to secure the ‘weather slot’ through Meteogroup. As previously mentioned there is no guarantee that the information supplied to Meteogroup would be used by any national newspapers. There is also the view that the value of the ‘weather slot’ is limited and that destination choices are based on more up to date information about local weather conditions. 

This would require an additional budget of £1,500 p.a. (over and above the existing provision) and assumes that additional staffing resources would be available to carry out the afternoon readings every day of the year. The staff providing the extended service would find this very onerous as this would require them to undertake readings twice per day including weekends and bank holidays. A review would be required of the number of staff needed to deliver this service and the indications are that volunteers would be very difficult to recruit. 

Option 3 – Discontinue the Existing Service

This option is to implement the decision previously approved by Cabinet and terminate the provision of the whole meteorological service. This would result in information no longer being provided to the Met Office, The Visitor, other services and members of the public. 

Information is currently available from the following web sites that provide information on local weather conditions: -

http://www.morecambe-weather.info/index.asp

http://www.wunderground.com/weatherstation/WXDailyHistory.asp?ID=ILANCASH5

There is also a link on the tourism website www.citycoastcountryside.co.uk to the BBC weather forecast for the district.

The provision of data for the maintenance of sea and river defences is no longer essential as this is available from other data sources and improvements to the environmental monitoring station are planned that will include the facility to display  information on the web for remote monitoring. As previously mentioned the weather parameters of interest to the coastal team are not recorded in real time by the in house weather service discussed in this report. The data supplied for shellfish and bathing water samples is available from the Environment Agency as previously mentioned.

The removal of the weather station from the front of Morecambe Town Hall would require discussions with United Utilities over their automated rain gauge that is also located within the weather station enclosure.

This option would save approximately £1,500 per annum in the 2010/11 Draft Budget and future years.

Discontinue the Existing Service and Install Web Cams

This option is to again terminate the provision of the whole meteorological service but to introduce the use of web cams as another alternative source of providing weather information.

Some resorts are already using webcams linked to local authority or local tourism web sites to show weather conditions in real time. Tourism officers believe this is a more appropriate method of promoting Morecambe and the surrounding district and some preparatory work has already been undertaken to determine the associated costs.

As previously mentioned there is no budgetary provision for the one–off purchase and installation of web cams and this would require a growth item in the 2010/11 Draft Budget. However, the £1,500 per annum revenue saving in 2010/11 from discontinuing the existing service could be re-allocated leaving a one-off shortfall in the region of £1,500. It is expected that there will be an annual revenue saving from 2011/12 onwards, however it is not possible to quantify what this will be until the ongoing annual running and ad-hoc maintenance costs associated with the web cams have been determined.

The officer preferred option is Option 3 to discontinue the existing service.

The main beneficiary of the existing service is the Met Office due to the weather data that is supplied to them. The internal services who are supplied with information can obtain this from other sources and the coastal team are planning improvements to their environmental monitoring station for the weather parameters used for coastal monitoring. The methodology for collecting the manual data under the current arrangements is time consuming and is very onerous on the limited number of staff who provide the service. 

The tourism benefits from the introduction of the afternoon readings and the ‘weather slot’ are not quantifiable as there is no evidence that visitors will visit a destination because of the previous day’s weather. The decision to re-allocate the existing budget and to request a one-off growth item for 2010/11 for the installation of web cams is a matter for Cabinet to consider. 

Members considered responses to the consultation on the future of the Meteorological Station which had been received since the publication of the report. These included a response from the Met Office, appended to these minutes, which set out plans for the Morecambe weather station to be automated, confirming that funding was already in place to automate the station between 1 Apr 2010 and 31 Mar 2011 with all the costs of the installation of automatic equipment and provision of electrical supply being met by the Met Office.

Councillor Thomas proposed, seconded by Councillor Blamire:-

“(1)      That Cabinet accepts the offer from the Met Office and works with the Met Office on the automation of the Morecambe Weather Station,  which will enable the City Council to  cease  funding  the Morecambe Weather Station when the new automated Station is installed.”

Members then voted: -

Resolved unanimously:

(1)        That Cabinet accepts the offer from the Met Office and works with the Met Office on the automation of the Morecambe Weather Station,  which will enable the City Council to  cease  funding  the Morecambe Weather Station when the new automated Station is installed.

Officers responsible for effecting the decision:

Corporate Director (Regeneration).

Head of Property Services. 

Reasons for making the decision:

The decision takes account of the information received from the Met Office. It will ensure that the Weather Station remains in Morecambe and that the City Council’s funding of the Station will cease when the new automated arrangements are installed during the financial year 2010/11.