After hooraying in a £100m spend on rural roads in recent weeks and an alleged £80M spend on Cllr. Peter Jacksons ‘lick of paint’ at County Hall in Morpeth Tory County Councillors rejected an appeal from the Mayor of Alnwick Cllr Lynda Wearn to have the Town Centre Toilets in the Town's historic marketplace modernised and improved.
Two long serving County Councillors attended the meeting, Cllr. Gordon Castle and Cabinet member Cllr. Jeff Watson. Their response to the Mayor was labeled shocking by opposition members outside of the meeting.
The County Councillors hand washing statement made on the Tories behalf by Councillor Castle ”well don’t hold your breath” illustrated that Northumberland County Council has lost touch with its Unitary status. Since May 2017 the Tories have gone gung ho on former County Council obligations with spend on highways, schools and social services, leaving very little to cover the responsibilities they inherited from the former District Councils in 2008.
In a town whose economy is completely reliant on visitors and out of town shoppers, good quality centrally sited modern public toilets are essential and it's the County Councils job to supply and maintain them.
Since May 2017 the County Council has had huge supplements of cash from both the Borderlands partnership and the North of Tyne Combined Authority yet the waste of Capital cash on matters that only aid the West, Morpeth and the extreme North of the County leaves places like Alnwick floundering and its Town Council finding itself in a similar position to both the towns of Bedlington and Ashington with redundant building sites in both Town Centres (AKA ‘Holes’) and now we find Alnwick joining the list of towns being ignored.
With the Tories financial portfolio holder Cllr. ‘Nick’ Oliver delivering a medium term financial plan with a revenue income for 2020/2021 of £789,310,000 and a Capital sum of £208,959,406 just a little less than £1Bn, without the extras from the Borderlands and the North of Tyne Mayoralty why can’t most areas share that spend?, we believe this is simply because they do not have the foresight to derive a market towns strategy in a similar vein to the last Labour administrations.
The other inability to deliver on behalf on Alnwick is the fact that theTories on the County Council are being investigated by multiple agencies following allegations of bullying, corruption, racism, and dodgy land dealings with many of the complaints coming from Council officers and when electors look at the amount wasted on legal wranglings against developers, the cost of paying off multiple members of staff who they have fallen out with, the massive cost of changing the name of ARCH to Advance Northumberland and the compensation payments to staff members who won cases of wrongful dismissal in court and more recently now that Advance are being sued for £millions after not following an instruction from the County Council’s CEX.We believe this all adds up to a dysfunctional Council led by chancers who are responsible for wrecking the rulebook they are meant to work with and follow. This waste is central to the County Councils refusal to help towns outside their chosen few.
I shudder with embarrassment when I think of the shock from foreign visitors having to use these disgraceful toilets.
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