A core promise to get re-elected Councillor Glen Sanderson the autocratic leader of Northumberland County Council regularly promised to cut staff numbers and lessen the amount who earn £100,000 plus. He either failed to deliver his promise or Boris Johnsoned the Council Tax payers of the County as a huge increase in those numbers has taken place since his declaration was made.
So to clamp down on opposition members of the council seeking clarifications of the autocratic leaders' decision making from officers of the Council, new rules have been brought in. Councillors in Northumberland have branded those new rules around contacting council officers "crackers".
Under the new policy, elected members are being forced to use the online members' enquiry system powered by an AI bot rather than getting in touch with officers directly to talk through on the ground problems. It is believed that in private, opposition members have told Leader Glenn Sanderson to ‘BOT OFF’ but as usual he has taken no notice of them at all.
That's not the only secret he’s been hiding (as you know the Cabinet at County Hall hide most of their decisions from the public), but two prime unanswered secrets are ‘what did the Tory fiasco over BRITVOLT cost you as a Council Tax payer’ and the denial by Gordon Castle a top Tory from Alnwick that the Tory Party stopped the dualling of the A1 through Northumberland in 2021 complete with a decision to suppress the information and hide it from public view.
Most readers of local politics in Northumberland will remember that when Ian Lavery MP asked Boris Johnson MP about the funding to kickstart the 8,000 promised jobs for Blyth, Johnson said “The cheques in the post”.
Google AI tells us all : The statement "The cheques in the post for BRITVOLT" refers to the failed attempt to secure funding for the Britishvolt gigafactory project in Northumberland. Britishvolt had planned to build a large-scale battery plant for electric cars but ultimately went into administration. The project faced numerous funding challenges, including delays and non-payments from investors. The factory site was eventually sold to a data center developer. Local press reporters exclusively told us that in 2022.
But the no cash for the A1 secrets were suppressed by Northumberland Tories who sneakily asked the public why Labour hadn’t coughed up the cash prior to the May elections according to information released from Parliament and published in our regional press.
Those sneaky Tories knew the project had been spiked by their Government and that no plan to fund had been put in place yet they still bought properties through compulsory purchase powers without a chosen Government route in place and work stopped on the project, with the floundering Councillor Gordon Castle pushing out a denial on social media as his Tory group ploughed on and paid out £68m of council tax payers money after the DfT reported that government analysis of the scheme in 2021 found the costs of the project would outweigh its benefits. An investigation is now needed to find out why cash was spent after that date.
The utter hypocrisy of surprise from Northumberland Conservatives was shown to be active again this week when they issued a sharp intake of breath fairy tale supposedly finding out that a new roof for concordia leisure centre was going to cost them half a million pound?
The same secret cabinet team in 2020 took a decision to plough ahead with a previous £3.5m scheme ground to a halt by the Peter Jackson led Cabinet made up only of Tories in 2017 to modernise and revamp the Council’s setup at Concordia based on a 2015 stock condition survey that illustrated the state of the roof at that time. 10 years on from that survey and surprise surprise as Cilla would say the secret has ‘leaked out’ as the rain soaks the interior of Concordia.
Isn’t it time the secret cabinet at County Hall was abandoned and a democratically split mixed cabinet installed so that all areas have access to the ‘state of the council’ thats deteriorating every day under the current mess and chaos at the half modernised County Hall in Morpeth another cost secret kept under autonomous leader Glenn Sanderson's teddy bear pillow.
Notes:
https://www.chroniclelive.co.uk/news/north-east-news/number-highly-paid-officer-positions-26779072
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/ce9xp98pkr0o
https://www.northumberland.gov.uk/News/2020/Feb/Council-to-relocate-Cramlington-services.aspx
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c4gk4jp7k0go
Microsoft Word - TR010020_APP_1.1 - Introduction to the Application
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