Is My Community Sustainable

I live in village called Kenton which is located near Exeter in Devon. I live in the super output area of Teignbridge 002E which I found out using this website. I used this website to determine whether I live in a Sustainable Community, this is the definition provided by the communities and local government website "Sustainable communities are places where people want to live and work, now and in the future. They meet the diverse needs of existing and future residents, are sensitive to their environment, and contribute to a high quality of life. They are safe and inclusive, well planned, built and run, and offer equality of opportunity and good services for all."

By definition I would personally say I don't live in a sustainable community. The main reason for this is that I can't see myself living and working in this area in years to come, firstly because it's a small village there are not that many jobs around anyway, and secondly there is very little to do and it's a severely boring place to live. Having said this however I believe it to be a very safe place to live with little crime and accidents occurring, also the recycling is very good in the area as you can pretty much recycle anything that can be recycled.

Some statistics suggest that it's a sustainable area to live in, e.g. only 5 people are on job seekers allowance. The majority of residents are in good health with 1164 people out of 1615 are in good health. Another way in which it's sustainable is that 807 people out of 1151 are economically active however many of these people commute between 5km - 20km for work which suggests that in the super output area itself there aren't a great deal of jobs and I imagine most people are commuting to Exeter to find work. I believe many people in the area have a high quality of life more than half of the people in the area find themselves in the AB to C1 social grades, which normally means higher income.

To conclude I do think my community is fairly sustainable one to live in, the only reason why I wouldn't want to live here in the future is because I find it boring, however I think it's a safe place to live, it's easy to commute to and from Exeter there is very little crime around and generally is quite quiet.

Education For Citizenship

I live in a village called Kenton which is around 10 miles away from the nearest city which is Exeter. Kenton is in a county constituency called Teignbridge and is represented in the House of Commons of the Parliament of the United Kingdom. Richard Younger-Ross is the current MP and he is a member of the Liberal Democrat party which dominates Teignbridge District Council, as shown here.

I personally do not have a huge concern with people not voting in the general election. If people do not want to vote then they don't have too, obviously in an ideal world everyone would in the country would vote so there is a majority decision between everyone. However I do feel that if their reasons for not voting are because they don't know what each parties policies are then maybe they could do some research and find out. After all the vote is there for your benefit so you may as well use it as it does not take much effort and it could benefit your life in the long run.

This web-page shows the turnout of each constituency at the 2005 General Election, as you can see the highest percentage was in Dorset West and that was only 76.3%, this shows that there are many people not voting for various reasons. Interestingly my constituency of Teignbridge had a fairly high turnout of 68.7%. However that's still 31.3% of people not voting if all those people voted it could mean there would be a totally different party in charge which could therefore mean different policies come into place.

As a student my main concerns regarding voting are mainly financially based. So therefore if parties have policies regarding cheaper student travel for public transport things like that. In the small village I live in when I'm home from University it does cost a lot of money for me to get the bus into Exeter so revised student fares would definitely be something I would approve of. Also because I live in a village, there is not much congestion or crime so they're things I'm not too fussed with.