Community Payback

Tuesday, 6 January 2009

Have you may have seen any people wearing bright orange jackets working in the Hebden Bridge and the Upper Valley during the festive period? If you have you'll have seen a team of men and women undertaking unpaid work as part of a community order. The National Probation Service supervises these men and women on a community order to undertake work for the benefit of local communities.

Working in Calder Holmes Park they have been undertaking the lengthy task of repainting the park railings and the festive period has seen much activity as many with community orders repay their hours out of work time.

Jason Boom, Environmental Community Warden for Hebden Royd Town Council, who organised the work told the Hebden Bridge Web, 'We started this back in the summer with volunteers from Royal & Sun Alliance but soon realised the scale of the task. Funding just was not available for contractors to carry out the work so volunteers seemed the way to go. With the community payback scheme you have a supervised, motivated workforce and they have been in the park for two days a week for the last couple of months. Progress may be slow but were getting there, lets hope its not like the Forth Bridge and we have to start again when we get to the end'

The probation service encourage the community to nominate projects for them to support, if your interested in this opportunity take a look at www.communitypayback.co.uk