Corporate Robbery? In bonny Morpeth of all places

You would expect that in the week when Northumberland County Council set its budget we would be leaning on Councillors who have joined in with their mismanaged Government and decided to engage in the spirit of 'New Conservative' policy and set eye-watering Council Tax levels higher than the once much maligned Poll Tax and took its debt levels soaring into £billions Well it's true, they have followed the Conservative line to ensure working families are starved of all surplus cash and when coupled with the highest personal tax rates for the last thirty five years which will hit those same empty pockets in April the 'New Conservative' plan will begin to click in. That plan is to get cash starved families on their bikes and fill the vacancies left by so many migrant workers returning home to Europe, although it's definitely true, no we're not telling that story.

 

Other regular readers may then have thought we would be describing a day in the life of the real 'New Conservative' leader of Council the shadowy Councillor Wearmouth, from his waking, then munching his dry cornflakes without milk, sipping his air warm water, kissing the iconic picture on his mantlepiece of Margaret Thatcher, sat next to the photo of police charging striking miners, then skipping over to County Hall to set this disgraceful Tax level. And imagine the glow on his cheeks afterwards sitting in the Sun Inn with his mates glorying in the thoughts of how his new Poll Tax will squeeze the last drop of dignity from his neighbours. Then of course how when he phones Rishi Sunak and says 'Rishi it's done, they're sunk' and rests his head on his pillow and dreams of the next gong list and his title to follow. Well we're not doing that story either.

 

The story we're going to tell is (The tale of the restrained Countryman), who got so excited he really let the cat out of the bag. A man who had held the post of business chair of the Council for four years under the thumb of the famously deposed former leader of the old guard Castle Morpeth Tories, Councillor Jackson. Yes its Councillor Dodd who sat at County Hall every day for four years absorbing the waste and overspend data of his colleagues and who probably today is being expelled from the party or at least facing deselection by his boss Councillor Wearmouth prior the next election as he took the shine off his day of emulating Margaret Thatcher's actions against humanity.

 

As regulars you know how secretive this Council has become and in this little few lines were going to explain the 'super secret' a secret poets and songwriters will dine on for decades and how it was revealed on Wednesday's video of full Council, when Councillor Dodd, in a biblical moment confessed to all, without a priest in the room were led to believe, and in his confessional moment as a ray of sunlight lit his angelic face 'that's an author's fib by the way', he blurted out the secret of all secrets, the holy grail of conservatism in the North East of England the story hundreds of freedom of information requests have not answered truthfully and about which a fabled saga filled with dragons and castles has been  formed. Its revelation has become ingrained in history beyond any secret which has gone before, his bloated blurt of "we have only spent £70m on the modernisation of County Hall" (so far) has entered the annals of history.

 

Postscript:

We noticed, via social media on Thursday 24th February 2022 that supporters of the Leader of the Labour opposition on the Council, Councillor Dickinson whose team voted against this disgraceful budget, uploaded photos of a bus trip organised hurriedly from his place of work to show local residents and Tax payers what a £70m spend of public cash looks like. We have been led to believe several visitors have suffered from shock. 

 

This shock to the system of the public comes after the Tories maligned Labour's spending plans to build a new set of offices in Ashington for a fixed price of £32m complete with a multi-purpose cinema/theatre within its Council chamber and help a deeply deprived area into the bargain. The Council delivered those plans to every home in the County and the support from businesses whose chances of survival would have been enhanced was enormous and would have brought as many visitors into the Town centre of Ashington when the rail link opens as left for work on Tyneside each day. But Morpeth centric Tories halted those plans and we believe that residents should be informed if the £70m included the compensation that had to be paid to the contractor when the job was stopped or if that has to be added to the final costings?

 

It's also rumoured from the Council's department for tourism that those who love horror and make regular visits to Bram Stoker's Whitby are planning to bring Morpeth's County Hall into their itinerary from 2023. And we're looking forward to another blurt of the full costs of Tory waste somewhere around 2035.

 

Blyth Town being revived by Commercial Landlords, will County Council involvement halt great progress?

 For five years the residents of Blyth have been bombarded by the rhetoric flowing from County Hall in Morpeth about how the Conservative administration is going to revive and more recently 'level up' Blyth Town Centre by building on its Town Square a part of which is its 'market place'.

The County Council's proposal to build a hotel on the bus station site and a culture centre, (whatever that is) on the Town Square site was the Conservatives answer to revive a Town which has suffered badly since 2010. 

The raining down of austerity from successive Conservative Government's since 2010, made things much worse for Blyth with the Town being home to a huge number of public sector workers. 

The public sector has suffered from pay freezes and well below inflation pay rises right through the last 12 years lowering the spending level in a town already suffering from average family incomes being 16% lower than the North-East region.

The plans and promises from Morpeth Conservatives have been badly hit by non-acceptance from property owners and businesses who believe the suggested way forward isn't for them and with Northumberland Estates, the owners of the Keel Row centre  also being hit by the low level of available cash in the Town the down turn was thought to be endemic. 

It looks like the Hotel proposal has been lost as the bus station owners do not want to change its use at a time the Government has decided to cut back on bus funding and fuel costs are being held artificially high to allow fuel tax to fill the Chancellors coffers.

The downturn is not new as the Town was slow in breaking through from its former heavy industry days and during 2016 the last Labour administration in charge at County Hall took the bold steps to buy the former massive and closed Co-op building on Waterloo Road and convert it into three large units. 

This was an unmitigated success and although those shops have had various tenants since they have remained open for business.

Luckily for Blyth residents, local commercial landlords have begun a shops revival just as we are breaking out from the pandemic, led by local lad Martin Trinder who is modernising and letting commercial premises at an amazing rate so one can only presume he has a good price formula that allows businesses to flourish. Other commercial developers and landlords are following his lead and a Town revival is underway.

It may be time for Northumberland Conservatives to turn their attention to developing the Dun Cow Quay if a 'Culture Centre' is really required at all, and have the market run by a successful management company as the County Council have let it slide into almost oblivion and advertising to attract custom seems to be based on zero input from the Council. 

Business and commerce is certainly improving the Town without the sticky fingers of Northumberland Conservatives being involved. So let's have a change of heart and help Blyth town centre improve and revive without your input.

Will changing housing rules in rural areas be thought of as 'Levelling Up' by families in need?

 The Government has announced a £125m bribe to Councils who remove local connection tests from their agreed housing policies in order to help victims of domestic abuse. The funding will come from the 'Department for Levelling Up' who will launch a consultation into the matter.

The cash can be used to support healthcare,social workers, benefits,interpreters, immigration advice and other services for victims.

The release of the news via the Daily Mirror kickstarted a crescendo of noise across social media particularly in the North and West of the County from young families caught in the property trap, living in high cost private rents who aspire to be housed in Council or Housing Association homes and fear they will be pressed down the Northumberland County Council homefinder queues if local connection tests are abandoned because the cash strapped Council needs access to Government cash.

Onevery articulate message said: 'It's been reported the County Council is borrowing £43m to pour into the pockets of developers to build Affordable Homes, when it really needs to invest in increasing the County's social housing stock to help families like my own live in a decent home, supplied by the Council or a housing association who will treat us with respect. I do worry about people who suffer from domestic abuse but cutting off locals in need anddamaging our aspirations in life is wrong and I hope our Councillors will reject this reported consultation.'

This Levelling Up report comes directly on the back of an industry report stating that private landlords need to increase their holdings by 230,000 per year overthe next decade.

We here at Murky would like to think Council's should listen to its residents who would rather live in well managed social housing and switch their borrowing requirements towards what people want and the safety aspect of domestic abuse can be encompassed into the enlargement of social stock locally and nationally and stop the plague of second home ownership driving residents into the hands of absentee landlords and the problems that policy brings. The answer to the forthcoming consultation must be to ask how does the suggestion help level up Rural and East Coast towns housing problems!

 

 

£15m set aside for new theatre in Berwick, Blyth to get an unwanted 'Culture Centre' while Ashington promises 'founder on the rocks'?

 

It's great to see that the 'Borderlands' project has been accessed to locate £15m worth of funding to replace the maltings theatre in Berwick. 

It is expected a good number of architects will engage in the competition to design a 'theatre for the future' as it's been described in the arts world.

Luckily according to the information issued on Scottish Borders and Cumbrian web pages, Borderlands projects are being handled by regeneration teams from the Council's involved with the project.

Northumberland County Council's regeneration team are also named in the delivery of the 'Blyth Culture Centre', to probably the least enthused public in the County on the back of underlying fears that its creation and centralisation agenda will destroy the culture and services people benefit from across the Counties largest Town. Along with rumours from facebook cads, who assure the public will contain a Levy Lounge, an Oliver Office and a Sanderson Suite all unwanted since 'partygate' and 'energy-gate' showed how little the Conservatives care.

But the (Whole of) Ashington doesn't appear to have any input from a regeneration team with the promises spun out from the mouth of the disgraced Tory Councillor Peter Jackson that he wanted to build a cinema on the site reserved for a new Council Office valued at £4m and that the Council would bankroll the losses of a cinema delivery company to have the project brought to life.

Northumberland Conservatives should have had Councillor Jackson's lips sewn together (metaphorically speaking) as his mate, the Tory mayor of Teesside has shown Northumberland what it costs to build a cinema and how to bring in a provider to deliver the project that will not burden the already stretched Leisure Management budgets of the Teesside Council's.

Mayor Ben Houchin has engaged with his local regeneration body, its combined authority who agreed to spend £9.7m on a similar project in Redcar, more than twice the figure quoted by Peter Jackson and when the Berwick theatre project is analysed, closer to what people would expect.

Northumberland has left thehandling of their promised project in Ashington to its Leisure Services management team, a team they are slashing £600,000 from in this year's round of cuts.The
Theatre, arts and sports groups are wondering how Arts Council, culture and sports grants will be handled and managed in future when staffing costs are so massively cut,  they don't seem to be getting any answers from the 'Morpeth Mafia' and ask is there a future outside of the Council's own core funded empire once Morpeths new Leisure Centre opens?

https://bdaily.co.uk/articles/2022/02/09/10m-teesside-seafront-cinema-nears-completion?utm_source=bulletin&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=2022-02-10-north-east&utm_content=readmore&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Bulletin%20for%20North%20East%202022-02-10%20080100&utm_content=Bulletin%20for%20North%20East%202022-02-10%20080100+CID_bdd50d67f5fe8bd5817ebe27b205f7b4&utm_source=CampaignMonitor&utm_term=Read%20more 

'Catastrophic Care Costs' will hammer Northumberland families?

The Government's recent amendment to the social care costs cap designed to protect families in areas containing high levels of third and fourth generation property inheritance will seriously damage family wealth across Northumberland.

The amendment is designed to only count money personally contributed by an individual towards their care and does not include or count means tested Council support.

That surplus finance does not exist in areas like Northumberland where in the main families do not have many tiers of inheritance to fall back on.

Also with the number of Universal Credit claimants doubling over the last two years, savings County-wide are at an extremely low level as elderly residents have been attempting to keep the wolves from their families doors during this dreadful period for residents.

 Familie of elderly residents forced into care are facing a triple whammy this year with the Tory led County Council forcing up its annual tax levy to aid social services  by an additional 2.25% above the Council tax base setting.

The Conservative Government's social care cap is forcing claimants families to sell homes they hoped to inherit at a much earlier stage in a care plan than previously expected, due to a lack of family cash in circulation.

The third whamm is caused through a local health provider, Northumbria NHS Healthcare Foundation Trust opening a very large care provision service in competition to the current providers. They will expect early care to be paid for, with their adverts for professional carers strengthening pay within the sector also contributing to increased cost burdens on those in need.

Both the Health-Foundation and the Institute for Fiscal Studies have warned the

public  that the Government's amendment to the social care cap will disproportionately impact on households in the North-East and the effect will be10 times larger than across most of the South creating a catastrophic problem for families with Yorkshire, West Midlands, Humber and the East Midlands falling just behind the abominable damaging effect the Government's amendment will lay on the shoulders of Northumberland and North East families and the needy.

 

Well fancy that? Tories grasping at straws to make up a jackanory!

 

With poverty and deprivation at all levels being the fastest growing industry in Northumberland's second largest Town, Cramlington, we noticed a news article from the Tories splinter group praising a projected £50,000  highways maintenance scheme for their Town.

The Conservatives at war in Northumberland have through this bdaily item shed a light on the size of the split in their ranks with the current losing side,  the Cramlington Conservatives, being the losers in a spending review by their colleagues at County Hall in Morpeth planning to take the borrowing requirement for the County over £1bn with an additional capital borrowing requirement of £307m headlined in this year's budget.

We have seen promises to deliver a £50,000 maintenance spend from the current Leader of the Conservatives Councillor Sanderson a former Castle Morpeth councillor before, with his announcement that £50k would be spent repairing the surface of the ranch car park, in Seaton Valley close to theTown of Byth.

Hundreds if not thousands of local drivers and families have seen what sort of neglect a £50k spend can produce with a simple spread of broken pebbles and stones being slung in the car park's famous potholes that lasted no more than a few weeks.

So many hearing of this proposed spend have likened it to Councillor Sandersons previous attempt at upsetting his rivals as the ranch car park sits in the ward of Hartley previously held by the former Labour Leader Susan Dungworth so they are waiting with baited breath to see what his biggest enemies, those within his party from Cramlington will get for £50k, were betting on enlarged potholes and massive embarrassment for those carrying the bottles of the blue social stain around the second largest Town in Northumberland.

https://bdaily.co.uk/articles/2022/02/01/northumberland-county-council-plans-to-make-cramlington-uks-first-green-town-with-50k-town-centre-upgrades

Tribunal awards £2m to a claimant for victimisation and sex discrimination so what will 'bullygate' cost Northumberland ratepayers?

 

As the leading Conservatives on Northumberland county council  move ever closer towards having to face up to a Court's opinion on the well publicised bullying, victimisation and discriminatory actions against its Chief Executive officer, Mrs Daljit Lally MBE.

The recent ruling and award fell against the bank BNP Paribas with the claimant suffering similar actions against them as those rumoured to have been suffered by Mrs Lally. Unlike the Council, we were unable to find any available script that BNP Paribas had been involved as heavily as Northumberland county council in other huge compensation payments to its officers either in court or via massive compromise agreements also known as gagging clauses.

 Paying off and/or removing those not liked by Northumberland Conservative Councillors has already cost the Council taxpayers estimated sums running into several £millions and to the demise from office of its top Councillor and leader Peter Jackson who was booted out by a combination of opposition Councillors and a splinter group of his own members who were upset that the early actions of 'bullygate' and its consequences had fallen at their door.

 But the remainder of the mob which runs the Council have been unable to hide their activities and deeply ingrained feelings for long, leading to the current situation facing them and the Council having to defend itself against the boss of itself, a really incidious position for a public body to find itself in.

 But the big question for ratepayers, who can only watch this pathetic rabble making a mess of what should be an honour to serve the public by being a Councillor and turning the Authority into a workplace to be feared, is, if the tribunal is won by Mrs Lally, will the Council countersue the bullies to ensure the public doesn't suffer any further loss?.