Failure since 2022 rears its ugly head again.

During 2022 Northumberland Unitary Council Leader, Glen Sanderson promised the public that he would, in the true ultra right wing style of Putin or Farage, tackle the pay levels of Council officers to cut £1m from the wages bill while ignoring the fact that his Council has an adopted job evaluation scheme and therefore pays the accepted ‘rate for the job’.

His 2022 public promise glamorous Glen as he has been known by his mates for years made the pledge after it was revealed that in his party's view the council was paying huge sums to a large number of top officers.

Shortly after his promise was made he pushed up top officers' pay again when he recruited a new Chief Executive on a starting salary of £199,000. With the numbers rising from 20 paid more that £100k in 2022 to 26 in 2024 an unmitigated failure when tested against his previous promise.

The Council has since its inception in 2009 listed all posts with salaries over £50,000, to elected members then in 2020/21 a change to the Councils constitution forced in via the Council's audit committee brought the full list onto the Councils final accounts and on to the Councils website.

With his neighbours and locals commenting quite often asking how he has time to lead a Council when as a farmer during these post Brexit times he needs to spend more time watching his crops grow fatter every day and running his agri business. But ploughing on so to say and not delivering his promises at Council level he has recently decided to increase high level staff further.

In the background of his Chief Executive being remunerated close to a quarter of a million pound per annum following Glen accepting the begging bowls of officers delivered through his secret cabinet of decision makers, councillors attended their March 26 meeting dizzy through social media comments asking them most just couldn't answer.

So at this week's Council the Leader introduced a new job valued at £140,000. Some councillors were apoplectic, with a long standing lady councillor from the North of the county taking to social media with this message:

Northumberland County Council

** £100,000 + salaries **

At yesterday’s meeting, which you can watch back via * (Northumberland TV), the Council agreed to create a new Director post on a salary of £140,000.

I voted AGAINST this as did other Independent colleagues and a couple of Reform with one Labour abstention.

Recently, NCC was found to have the highest number of staff paid over £100,000 in the North East region for the FIFTH year in a row.  Despite assurances, new posts with these level salaries continue to be created each year.

I was rather surprised that the vast majority of Reform Councillors supported this given their stated aim of ;

“Reform UK aims to reduce "mind-blowing" local government waste by capping high salaries and cutting administrative costs. Proposals focus on stopping council tax hikes, reducing the number of executives earning over £100,000”

The Council labeled this week in the press by an MP as incompetent showed signs of the leadership breaking up with we suspect Reform gaining over the short term, the Councillor from the north’s advice to watch proceedings on tv are very valid and you will see the crumbling administration at first hand as it begins its journey towards dust blown away into history

Notes

https://www.chroniclelive.co.uk/news/north-east-news/northumberland-county-council-wage-savings-25066598

https://www.northumberlandgazette.co.uk/news/politics/new-chief-executive-at-northumberland-county-council-set-to-pocket-ps199000-salary-3896979

https://www.northumberland.gov.uk/NorthumberlandCountyCouncil/media/About-the-Council/transparency/structure%20and%20salaries/Senior-Management-Salary-Information-1-April-2025.pdf

Labour’s Mayor is right, but Northumberland Tories need to look with their other face if released promises are to succeed?

 North East Mayor Kim McGuinness has announced a £22 million investment aimed at driving the development of over 1,100 new homes, including a significant proportion of social and affordable housing across the region.

The sites her combined authority have announced are primarily brown field and former public use land with services either on or sitting close by. You may wonder why we have mentioned services in this way? The reason is that current accepted planning permissions in the region will suffer long waiting periods due to Northumberland securing 10 Data Centres and the top planning advisors Litchfields leafleting homes in West Sleekburn regarding their plans to site some more on land designated for industrial and commercial development.

The sites at Cambois and the Sleekburn area are ideal for Data Centre use although they don’t provide many jobs. The area is home to  the river blyth and sleek burns for cooling water along with the National Grid and a transformer plant that can manage oodles of power, currently coming in from Norway through the international link and about to accept offshore power from the Berwick wind farms and overspill from the Scottish wind and solar plants currently being built in the Firth of Forth/Fife areas as Scotland can’t use all of the power it will produce domestically.

The Housing federation has concerns regarding the growth of Data Centres as even with the Scottish and Norwegian incoming power the current and future plans set in place by the Tories

Northumberland Conservative led County Council who swamp the public in the County with glamour statements each and every day never ever backed up with medium and long term plans backed by the whole Council, as every cabinet decision is delivered in secret along with the Chairs of Council and scrutiny highly trained to kill off speeches and questions from opposition parties stifling debate at every turn, are unable to deliver on their promises but could if they change their ways?

The latest promise is that they have developed plans to deliver 11,000 new jobs across the County over the next nine years. This is the third time those same councillors have issued similar statements since 2017 and the plans have fallen by the wayside each and every time.

The main reason for potential failure isn’t just the lack of backing from all parties on the Council, its the lack of Council and affordable housing all over the County, a county filled with elderly people, care homes, second homes and nimbyism way beyond the norm with class hatred sitting alongside racism as always high on the development agenda of the Tories in office. The class hatred the farming leader of council displays is clearly shown on the national unison website “UNISON are deeply concerned over the statement made by the leader of the council in relation to staff wages. The comments made by Councillor Sanderson are wholly unacceptable and gives the impression that staff are unvalued and over paid. Jobs within Northumberland County Council are fairly evaluated through the nationally agreed job evaluation”.

Northumberland Conservatives whose overspends on social services on a regular and ongoing basis, the rundown of schools through the lack of children and the reason they struck 7000 applicants for Council housing off their lists is why they need to turn their second faces and look to see why housing shortages will deny them the opportunity of delivering their yet to be seen in public plans for those jobs and keep Northumberland locked in as a six week summer economy council for holiday makers for evermore.

This week the BBC issued this story: Grid connection priority needed to stop housing stalling: The Home Builders Federation has urged the Government and Ofgem to ensure that AI data centres are not given priority over housing developments in the queue for grid connections. Executive director Steve Turner said that as proposals are considered to prioritise "strategically important" projects - potentially including AI infrastructure, electric vehicle charging hubs, and industrial sites - it is "frustrating that regulatory, planning and policy arrangements effectively prioritise energy intensive data centres over energy efficient homes for families". Failing to prioritise housing, he said, would result in an "effective moratorium on new homes in areas where capacity is constrained".

In order to get around that Northumberland in particular among those members of the combined authority need to borrow and increase their Council housing stock by bringing empty properties back into use so that grid connections do not become and issue for them since they will be raking cash into the Councils coffers from the Data centres already underway at Cambois as well as the future plans from Litchfields.

With a housing waiting list topping 14,000, the affordability of social services adult care in negativity each and every year, Schools short of 12,000 pupils, 2000 recorded empty homes sitting across the County and a black mark sitting over the heads of the council from the housing inspectorate, the Council needs to u-turn to resolve it problems. Firstly they need to develop older persons Council housing on the North-east Mayors sites as all consultation with the elderly of which Northumberland has far more than others through historical population drift, lack of jobs since the Thatcher years etc., wish to stay in their own homes until the end of their lives if possible. An extended District Nursing and Care service already planned by Northumbria Healthcare foundation trust working in conjunction with the Council on new bungalow sites would be a start. 

Developing and bringing 2000 empty homes back into use as part of the housing stock will allow families to settle and have children in a safe long term environment then the building of some Council housing in each and every village would keep the schools alive close to other homes so that grid connection isn't a problem could help save Northumberland from the clearances that have made it so costly to develop jobs in Scotland pour over the border into England's most northerly County and the Tories long term plans need to recognise this!

The new motto for any incoming administration in the County needs to be ‘Develop for needs or die’.

Notes:

https://www.northeast-ca.gov.uk/news/housing-and-land/north-east-mayor-announces-22m-to-build-1-122-new-homes-across-the-region

https://www.northumberlandgazette.co.uk/news/politics/council/council-approves-ambitious-plan-with-potential-to-create-up-to-11000-new-jobs-5627646

https://www.easterngreenlink2.co.uk/

https://www.northsealink.com/

https://www.chroniclelive.co.uk/news/north-east-news/jobs-blyth-employment-northumberland-cars-19435348

https://www.politicshome.com/members/article/the-innovation-premium-how-the-net-zero-transition-is-driving-economic-growth

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c9dn2znzez7o

3 Weeks after setting a budget, Morpeth Tories are about to set another.

'In secret'.

With the ink not even dry on the budget reluctantly set at County Hall following promises that the secret all-conservative cabinet will share all policy decisions with other parties and that the public will be better served through more diligent scrutiny the wheels have come off.

Dodgy decision making is back on the cards with a massive campaign to bring contracted volunteers (slave labour?) in to cover for jobs that will shortly disappear creating a two tier workforce and their financial plans are to be reworked into a new economic plan as SEND Funding along with Social Services budgets are NOT expected to cover service costs.

It also seems that those same Morpeth Tories have lost faith in their treasury department and are proposing to bring in a national team of costly accountants to ‘look after’ the small beer by council finance funding standards, cash from the few local jobs data centre project being developed over the next decade at Cambois in South East Northumberland.

The Council leader has also announced a huge number of jobs to be created in Northumberland for the third time since taking office (and we codgers won’t hold our breath) as very few new jobs have been created since May 2017 by the Morpeth only team under his banner. He and his Britain failing party's announcements in 2021 and 2022 both fell by the wayside so how can anyone have trust in anything spewing from the lips of Tories locally. 

Recently the only Tory jobs suggestion for the poorest area in Northumberland has come from its top Blyth Tory Town Councillor Erskine who is running a consultation on facebook to bring a ‘Car Boot Sale’ into the Town Centre. What sort of retail and jobs improvement is that?

Car boot sale as a catalyst, the county council leader seems to be heavily supportive of a further rundown of his poorest town as ‘he’ the single democratically elected shareholder of Advance Northumberland is keen on refinancing  the always busy Manor Walks shopping centre, a centre his council technically already owns, improving it further at the expense of other townships across the County.

With the only common theme running through this Council is its level of dysfunctionality? 

The lack of release of any real improvement plans or information so the paying public can check on how its council is doing on the national stage, when scoped along with the low level of information in the Council meeting minutes on scrutiny findings and results shows exactly why after just a few weeks a budget to resolve the budget has had to be pushed out hidden in a blaze of hopefully third time lucky announcements of huge numbers of jobs to be delivered over the next four years. 

But without the announcement of when and where new social housing is to be developed, better rural buses routed into work zones and a greater understanding of younger workers' needs his promises will fail yet again , leaving Northumberland as a dormitory county for the rich second home owners who turn up for six weeks in the summer.

https://northeastbylines.co.uk/news/education/northumberland-further-multi-million-pound-overspend-on-councils-send-expected/

https://www.northumberland.gov.uk/news/ambitious-plans-be-unveiled-countys-economic-future

https://www.hexham-courant.co.uk/news/19425544.green-light-new-blyth-gigaplant-create-8-000-jobs/

https://www.facebook.com/Richard4BasildonAndBillericay/posts/this-is-massive-news-thousands-of-jobs-just-up-the-road-in-blyth-and-thousands-m/639070980880204/

https://www.northumberlandgazette.co.uk/news/people/northumberland-well-placed-for-vital-jobs-growth-says-levelling-up-minister-3608101

https://www.northumberland.gov.uk/about-council/working-northumberland-county-council/volunteering#:~:text=Find%20out%20about%20the%20types,volunteer%20opportunities%20across%20our%20services.

Dysfunctional Tory Council caught ‘gaslighting’ its residents?

Northumberland County Council, defined over the last 14 years of a Tory Government in office as a ‘rural all purpose local authority’ even though 54% of its population live in the cramped urban South-east of the county, have been complaining about the change in funding with the Government of the day steering increases in spending power to help reorganise and smarten up urban areas everywhere.

Northumberland County Council pre 2009 was a strategic County Council level authority and lived up to that name very well indeed during the 2001 foot and mouth epidemic. Then a creep by national governments to integrate levels of local government to try to manage local government cost factors changed the face of strategic need leading to District Council services being integrated into the slimmed down highways, education, health and social care Counties and strategy slipping over to regional based ‘Combined Authorities’ utilising the skills of the private sector to try to improve the new conglomerate councils and get them moving at all levels.

Eventually regional mayors were brought in to help the whole public sector work together for the benefit of residents thereby easing the strategic burden even further from your local elected representative to enable them to concentrate on local needs and issues.

That change appears to have been grasped by most North-east Councils with the exception of Northumberland County Council which since 2017 has been attempting and failing to ‘hark back’ to the good old days when landlords, ladies and farmers ruled the roosts and the County spent its cash on improving their lot.

With the national picture changing through the Tories in office slashing budgets and grants each and every year in an even more rapid attempt to bring the ‘old ways’ under more modernistic control,Northumberland were inspected  by Max Caller, a government economic wizard and labelled dysfunctional in his final report.

With that in the background and the dysfunctional Tory-led County rarely sharing its position on the national league tables or leaking any information on its decision making into the public arena or even accepting the mayor for the region now runs strategy and direction they came out against the latest grant settlement from the Government in office who are trying to improve run down low income urban areas and level up society with local government’s help.

The leaning poured out with tongue in cheek vitriol gaslighting the residents of the county was that this change from rural to urban which gives a massive lift in spending power to the Council meant the Council couldn't deliver services in rural areas. With the shift of the £3.5m rural services grant being moved to an increase in spending power to manage an urban refresh over the next three years being pushed by Cllr. Nick Oliver as a disaster.

‘Wor Nick’, well named, showed no remorse when agreeing with his cabinet cohorts that 7,000 mainly urban families should be slashed from the Council social housing register as the Council whose finances he looks after wants to be seen as strategic, leaving delivery to others, effectively doing nothing.

The tales being told to the public exuding from County Hall in Morpeth forget that rural projects are now handled by the Mayor for the region and the combined authority or that care in now slipping further further towards being managed by the NHS  and in that issuing gaslighting publicity covered in crocodile tears has been exposed as ‘affordable’ by their own hand as Northumberland County Council did not apply to be considered for ‘exceptional extra funding being offered by Government to those who need it’ exposing their vulnerability towards being caught out (Boris Johnsoning) the public and they have.

https://www.gov.uk/guidance/exceptional-financial-support-for-local-authorities-for-2026-27

https://www.northumberland.gov.uk/economy-and-regeneration/projects-and-programmes/rural-growth-and-innovation/rural-asset-multiplier#:~:text=Applicants%20to%20submit%20applications%20by,wants%20to%20quickly%20get%20a

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cq5z7w9ez28o#:~:text=16%20March%202025,more%20to%20deliver%20council%20services.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c8e9zn6502jo

https://realnorthumberlandmurky.blogspot.com/2026/02/council-housing-chaos-across.html

Northumberland under pressure to resign top tories share a history of taking homes out of Council Control. are they at it again?.

 

Northumberland County Councillors, Horncastle and the Council Leader Sanderson from their respective former district council’s, Tynedale District and Castle Morpeth District were both embroiled in moving Council Homes out of Council control.

Councillor Sanderson at Castle Morpeth was involved with his former Tory partner, Councillor Peter Jackson when they forced through a large-scale voluntary transfer of their housing stock following years and years of a sad decline in housing repairs.

Councillor Horncastle sat on Tynedale District Council when they moved their homes to a social housing provider for a miserly £30m.

It enabled large groups of Northumberland Tories to dodge residents in serious housing need and send them on to other providers.

Councillor Horncastle, laughingly named as the Tories housing lead on their one party cabinet is fully tied in with support for ‘affordable homes only’, leaving Council housing to rot on its footings.

Residents across the County and in particular Council tenants have had enough of these two and they are now under pressure to resign.

https://www.northumberlandgazette.co.uk/news/politics/council/social-housing-regulator-finds-serious-failings-at-northumberland-county-council-5524383?fbclid=IwY2xjawP5tkxleHRuA2FlbQIxMQBzcnRjBmFwcF9pZBAyMjIwMzkxNzg4MjAwODkyAAEem6NLowU-za3oLah8S-nF3i_PploiNtCC2pWZEaGlgvG1zGMD1kXp3Jnom_8_aem_fhcIDaF80z2O7ycZ-MeKcA

https://www.insidehousing.co.uk/news/news/county-council-hit-with-c4-rating-over-unacceptable-failings-95873?fbclid=IwY2xjawP84q5leHRuA2FlbQIxMQBzcnRjBmFwcF9pZBAyMjIwMzkxNzg4MjAwODkyAAEeQKk3umMH9QbLBvn-T653HSlmjqRkLB99U7VG9-ohS0x0qvwFqrtPioPS8X8_aem_JOvAD9UcOhWizXWIZju0tw

https://www.northumberlandnationalpark.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/Northumberland-County-Wide-Housing-Needs-Survey-2012-Final-Report-10.07.13.pdf

https://www.northumberland.gov.uk/NorthumberlandCountyCouncil/media/Planning-and-Building/planning%20policy/Studies%20and%20Evidence%20Reports/Housing%20Studies/9.%20Local%20housing%20needs%20assessments/Blyth-Housing-Needs-Assessment_Final-Report-June-2023.pdf