Tories' attack on the elderly, disabled and vulnerable travelers from Berwick, Alnmouth and Morpeth can be helped by the Unitary County Council?

The disgraceful austerity slashback from the conservative government in power to close all railway station ticket offices is predicted by rail experts to be very damaging to the most vulnerable in society. 

The travelling public who are not fully computer savvy in order to buy their tickets need to feel confident when forking out large sums of their meager incomes or pensions (which are possibly damaged through the governments dreadful economic crisis) to travel to relatives or for medical treatment etc. The usually warm and helpful face behind the glass screen at their local ticket office puts most service users at their ease and are ever so helpful if people need the answers surrounding onward journeys from terminus stations or arrival times to make appointments.

The changes fully exclude anyone who needs to pay for rail tickets using cash they have saved to cover the cost of their journeys. The loss of the ticket offices denies those people the opportunity to travel safely and in comfort by train giving them a tough time to get to their destinations by other forms of public transport.

For the market towns of Morpeth and Berwick incoming visitors will become ever more limited which will affect businesses who need train travelers to bolster the local trade. But in Northumberland the all purpose unitary council could help enormously by taking over the service on behalf of residents.

The council may have made unlawful and illegal decisions in business previously but acting as a travel agent at a time when its own government is attempting to offload the service should be simply legalised through the government's various business departments.

Will they help? Let's see, or is the wind from the council leader all smoke and mirrors?

https://www.northumberland.gov.uk/News/2023/Jul/Leader-s-concern-at-ticket-office-plans.aspx

 

Councils to suffer as private enterprise and the free market movers back out of regeneration deals struck with Government?

Northumberland County Council being driven onto the rocks as Local Enterprise Partnerships going down the same swanny as Regional Development Agencies, it will be the Tories first element to reach ‘Net Zero’

The Government has announced that following an information gathering exercise earlier this year, it is now transferring the core functions of the Local Enterprise Partnerships (LEPs) to local councils. 

Whilst the Local Enterprise Partnerships will no longer exist in their current form, the Government has promised to provide ‘some revenue funding’ for 2024/25 to support authorities to “deliver the functions currently being delivered by LEPs”.  However, it has stated that “funding beyond 2024/25 is subject to future Spending Review decisions.”

The role of the LEP groups is to bring forward ideas to sustain small and medium enterprise businesses, aid the government's austerity and levelling up programs to gain traction with the electorate and monitor in an audit fashion the spend across larger projects, effectively to become the critical friend in and of public realm development.

In some areas this has led to direct conflict with elected mayors who wish to dominate regeneration projects for the attention they get from the public, particularly urban developments where urban projects can be designed to increase visibility to the work of LEP’s.

A recent survey by the British Chambers of Commerce looking at the suitability of SMEs’ local trading environments, found that those based in rural areas were less optimistic about the future, citing access to talent, public transport, and connectivity as key issues.  

A report from the Fabian Society explaining that public services in rural areas are no longer fit for purpose illustrates quite clearly why Northumberland County Council, a county classified as 96% rural should not be placed in a position by Government to take up regeneration services when its revenue and reserves are stretched to cover the cost of capital borrowing when there’s no sign of increased revenue for rural local authorities to cover the costs of future capital programs and take on ex-Local Enterprise Partnership debt. 

With half finished projects struggling through the Government's unmanaged economic crisis and raging inflation, LEP projects are under massive strain, most running late and those mixed up with levelling up promises falling flat.

Northumberland has an unfinished dock on the river Blyth with necessary alterations to suit one of the prime partners unfunded, a factory to build offshore cables running hugely late through LEP organised surveys not being good enough and under pressure from the Treasury wanting to stop offshore wind farm expansion as fossil fuel electricity production gives them more income, This all sits alongside a hollow promised battery production plant; A project which falsely promised to restore South East Northumberland’s reasonably paid jobs market. It has fallen through the Government and LEPs inability to locate a right and proper partner for the project and a Prime Minister who prefers Somerset to the North East to site this project. That's running alongside the Councils failed attempt to bundle LEP funded projects into a levelling up scheme for the Town of Blyth.

In our simple codgers opinion (we are all of one voice on this issue) the collapse of the LEP’s and regional regeneration needs to be the real remit of regional mayors who should be forming fully funded through Government, Regional Development Agencies to handle projects and cash that local authorities can steer projects into and not Local Authorities who are now ruined and being used as a punch bag by Government being dragged further into the mire and that mire, is leading to the downfall of services across rural council areas, with Northumberland being one of the largest rural Councils with ever failing services in the UK.

Northumberland Conservatives back in again!

 

                                 No  1605 25th August 2023

HIGH FLYER

YET another example of a council losing shedloads of taxpayers' money by getting involved in a business venture it was not qualified for, Northumberland county council failed to follow guidelines when setting up a business with a local NHS trust to market a health consultancy which dabbled as far afield as China.

     An internal investigation has found unlawful payments were made to seven high ranking officers, who were given final payouts totalling £1.3m. None of the exit packages were formally agreed by elected members.

     Last year, the council's business venture with Northumbria Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust was found to have incurred "unlawful expenditure" over four years since 2017. An internal investigation into the setting up of Northumbria International Alliance (NIA) revealed the Council had not adhered to the Localism Act of 2011 by designating NIA as a council business.

     As reported in the Eye 1579, the then council chief executive Daljit Lally was given an extra £40,000 a year on top of her council salary of £190,000. For being involved with NIA. She flew to the Middle East seven times at the cost of almost £19,000.

     An investigation by external auditor John Gilbert into NIA has found it operated without proper management. Decisions were taken at informal meetings by a handful of councillors. Records do not even show if the business made a profit or a loss.

     The council's audit committee was told that seven payouts totalling £1.3m were issued to senior county hall officials between 2017 and 2022 without proper sign-off from elected councillors. Exit payments to chief council officers must be approved by the authority's staff and appointments committee or by full council if the severance package exceeds £100,000, but this was not done. A provision detailing these rules in the councils pay policy was removed between 2019 and 2022 " for reasons that are unclear" a report to councillors has revealed.

     Members have been told by Tory council leader Cllr Glen Sanderson that the council is not taking action to recoup the money. He said: "The advice we have had from our experts is that it would be very difficult and very expensive to try to get that money back, even though there is a strong temptation for us to want to try." Easy come easy go!

Note

Northumberland county council has been run by the conservatives since 2017 until the present day. The council has had two decision making leaders in that time, Cllr Peter Jackson and Cllr Glen Sanderson and two deputy leaders Cllr Wayne Daley and Cllr Richard Wearmouth.

£28M to be slashed by Tory Council this year after wasting millions and driving fear through communities and people?

This week's park bench meeting and our round up of e-searches brought us the codgers band round to open thinking regarding what's going on behind the closed doors of the ‘Morpeth dependent party’ led by panicky Sanderson and get me a safer seat than this Richi-rich Wearmouth.

With their enemies bringing siege engines up towards the very gates of Loansdean and the snorting chargers slavering and snotting as the Morpeth dependent members are sideswiped by their own team and the mercenaries', opposition members from the north, south-east and west lands of this fabulous scenic county.

Questions are raging all over social media regarding a recent review of a report from the external auditor Mazars, asking why the independent chair of the audit committee has decided to leave. Those reasons are being speculated on by interested people sitting outside the Krall which Morpeth’s County Hall at Loansdean has become. 

According to social media: 

‘Allegedly Councillors who sat in silence through the meeting were informed through dodgy issued legal advice that to ask a question about the administrations Councillors involvement in International Health Trading would lead to their home being sequestered through the courts’. Striking fear into the most ardently brazen elected members. The money from sequestration is probably planned to be used to pay the legal insurance premiums which have had a real hammer since 2017 as the public purse has been stretched beyond compliance on behalf of ruling speculative decision makers in the name of business planning.

The alleged dodgy legal wranglers who have come from God knows where but faithfully employed by the Morpeth two, or probably cardboard cutouts of the Morpeth two, which its believed will be standing in shops dotted around the Town in a similar fashion to the famous ‘John Smith Man’, the action described above and the shameless laughter and chatter on the audit committee’s youtube release for the open part of the meeting. Knowing this bullying atmosphere would be well developed during the meeting possibly stopped many Councillors elected to represent the people from attending this particular audit committee meeting ; A meeting where all should have been revealed and for those who did brave this very sticky web it is believed they feared the worst through those threats and kept shtum. Councillors do not stand for election to represent local people to feel afraid to ask the questions their constituents want answer too but, losing your home? is just a bit too far for many.

Not a great way for democracy  or is that duckocracy? To prevail as the seriousness of this trickery, if social media can be relied upon, was to turn Morpeth into Dodge City when it came to exposing the unlawfulness and lawlessness which prevails in the vicinity of Loansdean empowering the cowboys to stick two fingers up to the second national auditor (Mazars) in the last six years as they had previously lost EY in similar circumstances  as the ultra-right paramours had to be correct and the experts wrong, illustrating that the social rules of decorum, etiquette and truthfulness matter not to the drivers of the wagon train brought in to cover over the clouds of deceit in the veil of mendacity created through the application of the ‘Pipers Tune’ being paid by the bruegaire.  

So how will the bruegaire react to the facts that they have and have been shown they are letting down the populous at a time when they need to progress to the oche and throw 180. Instead they still wish to retain the vertiginous goat shelf of the chamois while letting their acidic droppings rain down on the local folk below through the lack of support for projects they began since 2017 and will now abandoned gaily, such as youth housing in Berwick where exposure of their actions caused chaos, dualling of the A1, A battery plant at Cambois, the secrecy of Cabinet meeting where  huge Council failures are discussed in private and milder failures spoke about in public but the failures prevail and will prevail ever more as spend get centred in Morpeth and everyone and everywhere else is treated as second rate.

Spend is also on everyone's lips as the County Council languishes in the fact that swathes of the Counties residents pay more than 10% of their income on Council Tax and they are right to ask on ‘Fix my Street and letters to local newspapers why services can’t be delivered or resumed in any fashion close to how they were delivered as they had been before the the knowledge that Northumberland County Council had the fifth largest number of reported potholes and have had to fork out £millions in compensation as a pothole claim reaps vast rewards for motorists. 

Lawyers who can also guarantee to love Northumberland County Council as a source of wealth when planning appeal failures rack up £millions in compensatory payments for developers and their legal advisors. Developers like the profit in compensation as they then don’t need to expose their liquid assets and cash to build at all and simply need to wait for the next turndown of a planning decision from Councillors and then their spouses can choose better clothes at Fenwicks than bookmakers wives and it takes some dosh to top that.

Then of course we just also look at the now famous gagging payments in the form of confidentiality agreements to leaving employees in an attempt to stop the release of information into the public domain. How much have they sucked onto your Council Tax payments?

Over the years since Cameron began his austerity program, banks, financial institutions, the LGA and the Taxpayers alliance have come up with figures and formulas for Council cuts which range from £10m in cuts costs £20m in reality, up to £10M in cuts costing £30m in real terms.

The average is 2.5 times the figure Councils need to achieve as redundancy payments, HP on pension schemes, gagging payments and a myriad of other connivences to make people leave their jobs. This news from these experts means that under the current administration who have decided they must lose £28M from their business, and Councils are a business, Northumberland will have to spend £70M to reach their target cuts figure,

Reaching that figure in cuts that have been put back twice already from this administration will mean that ordinary people will suffer as social services, education, grounds maintenance, highways repairs, cash to go towards capital projects, affordable homes, social housing, and levelling up programs will all be slashed and you will never be told about it or given an explanation why, as secrecy is the norm for this Council and secrecy will be retained at whatever cost it is to society as a whole.

NOTES.

https://www.hexham-courant.co.uk/news/23730660.chairman-northumberland-county-councils-audit-committee-retires/

https://www.itv.com/news/tyne-tees/2023-07-25/county-council-payments-of-over-1m-to-managers-deemed-unlawful

https://www.chroniclelive.co.uk/news/north-east-news/council-cuts-resulting-optional-services-15808595

https://www.lgcplus.com/finance/county-issues-s114-notice-over-unlawful-payments-23-05-2022/

https://www.hexham-courant.co.uk/news/23693036.investigation-council-failures-international-business/