Ever more borrowing by NCC. Let's hope New North-East Mayors offices keep a weather eye on legacy loans?

 

Councillor Richard Wearmouth the Conservative head chap for the North-East, showed himself up on the TV this week when asked if he and his Council would work together with others and the North-East Mayor he went off piste and spoke about the Conservatives this and that and never actually answered the question.

Possibly after his reeling brain settled a bit, as his party had been crucified nationally, destroyed in North Tyneside and kicked in the teeth in Hartlepool with only one glimmer of hope as they won a Council seat on a single issue campaign in Newcastle North. This negative activity showing the long term plans of his design had unravelled, with his national Leader deciding a return to being the vocal nasty party was better than the secret society methods of Councillor Wearmouth did he come around and give a one liner to the Chronicle to say he would support the new North East Combined Authority.

The new openness lasted no more than a few hours when in an attempt to steal a positive headline and steer peoples eyes away from his groups loss of 8000 jobs in Cambois and replacing them with an environmental disaster set against his Councils declaration of a climate emergency by selling the site for all those jobs to develop a power hungry data centre he rolled out an improvement plan for the nearby Ashwood Business Park in the Northumberland Gazette.

Councillor Wearmouth has been involved with two previous attempts to kick start this enterprise zone site, announcing a masterplan from Advance Northumberland in 2019 revealing £250m was available for development work through its Enterprise Zone status and an announcement that the North East Local Enterprise Partnership (NELEP), in conjunction with the Council and Advance Northumberland had agreed to invest £2.7m in opening up the site in 2020.

So here we are in 2024 with neither the masterplan or the sub plan spend doing very much as the filling station and cafe’s on the site were funded by their landlords Euro garages, Yet the same Councillor Wearmouth is now promising to open up the site and deliver 1000 jobs and has BORROWED £2.3m from the outgoing NELEP who ceased to exist on May 2nd 2024 when the new mayor for the North-East region was elected.

With Councillor Wearmouths organisation, Northumberland County Council spiralling downwards almost daily this announcement to the public of borrowing ever more must be an immense worry for the new Mayors office as it is responsible to collect the repayments of legacy lending that the NELEP has doled out with NCC’s dysfunctionality still not corrected two years on after the Caller report.

With Northumberland County Council’s treasury department being rated by the Conservative Government in Office as 246th from 301 Councils nationally and the overall position of the Council sitting at 300th from 301 with only the bankrupt Nottingham City Council holding them up one place then the mayor and her officers have a good right to worry about repayments not being made or the third crack at this site being successful ever happening at all as the secretive Councillor Wearmouth has simply placed innuendo in the press about whose hooked in if anyones really showing interest at all its a simple headline grabbing trick from a one trick pony.

The only good to come from the announcements and a promise that may be delivered is that at long last the North Seaton/A189 roundabout is to be fitted with lights following a major local campaign being fully supported by Labour Councillor Liz Simpson from Newbiggin by the Sea along with the local traders association chair Enid Wilson and the Town Council hitting home as the Tories begin to look for friends with the local elections being less than a year away.

 
Notes:

https://www.northumberlandgazette.co.uk/business/councillors-agree-to-spend-millions-on-upgrading-infrastructure-at-a-business-park-in-ashington-4619316

 

https://www.chroniclelive.co.uk/news/north-east-news/a189-north-seaton-roundabout-lights-28596991

 

https://www.newbiggintowncouncil.gov.uk/2024/02/02/north-seaton-roundabout/#:~:text=At%20the%20meeting%20of%20the,opening%20of%20the%20new%20garage.

 

https://www.chroniclelive.co.uk/news/north-east-news/ashwood-business-park-ashington-investment-29127338?int_source=nba

https://www.northumberlandgazette.co.uk/news/people/more-than-ps14m-being-invested-to-support-ashington-business-park-3375465

 

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/8a31933e-b16e-44df-b745-0d5e5108eec3?shareToken=a9e6331a245aae6206ba3159fad52fe6

 

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-tyne-61740195

 

https://www.pbctoday.co.uk/news/planning-construction-news/northumberland-unveiled/66781/

 

https://www.chroniclelive.co.uk/news/north-east-news/around-90-jobs-created-4m-18938350

 

Daljit Lally 2018 memorandum of understanding with Government
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/5ad610f7e5274a76c13dfc1e/Northumberland_MoU.pdf

NORTHUMBERLAND CONSERVATIVE COUNCILLORS

• 
  
  We failed to deliver 8000 jobs in Blyth,

• Decide to cover up by selling the site for those jobs without a buy back clause,

• Now threaten to black out the North-east in winter,

• Why? Because we're Northumberland Conservatives! and were better than everyone else! Even though one of our team had to ‘escape’ from a Mayors hustings meeting due to his disgraceful Gaza-Palestine comments!

Failed promises, the destruction of Blyth Town Centre, the huge let down to residents by losing the opportunity to bring higher paid employment to the South-East of the County creating 8000 jobs and the distancing of the strategic Conservative led Northumberland County Council from blame when deals with equity companies and carpetbaggers failed to produce the goods. 

Making a comparison with the same Tory groups candidate for office as North east mayor labelling the deaths of thousands of innocent people and the UN expressing concerns that hundreds of thousands are starving to death in Palestine, Northumberland County Council Secret Cabinet Member Guy Renner Thomsons comments that Gaza-Palestine questions at a hustings for the North East Mayor are simply ‘sixth for politics’ shows why any decision to sell this site through a brokered ‘Deal’ involving Cabinet members from Northumberland needs to be stopped in its tracks and Ministers need to intervene.

The latest ‘deal’ as crumbling Conservatives Councillor Richard Wearmouth describes the sell off of the Britvolt site in Cambois Northumberland at a give away price without the chance of getting it back if his ‘deal’ like most other deals the Conservatives in Northumberland have been involved with fails. 

The question of potential failure even being asked of a strategic council illustrates why his own Government failed to support Brit-Volt as a top priority project and why Councillors from the Conservative party have yet again attempted to con the public when telling them they have other sites to build a battery plant on. The now famous Max Caller report into the Council's failings and mismanagement says it all.

The Cambois site was and is unique when choosing where to build a battery plant, it has harbour access across the road within 500m of the site entrance stopping the need to transport dangerous chemicals and placing danger to the public on our highways system. The harbour was also to be used to export batteries world wide.

It has very close access to a rail depot to whisk batteries around the UK and a proposed siding has been discussed at public meetings.

It is the home to Norwegian hydro energy input into the UK via the North Sea Link to stabilise our need for energy on windless and dull days in the North-east as we move ever more reliant on green energy sources.

Other sites described by Northumberland’s Conservative Councillors do not have similar geographical advantages and will not warrant input by speculators or carpetbaggers unless it is to act as agents and get ex-industrial land cheaply to be converted into housing sites. If the County Councils independent Councillor for Berwick gets the council to agree to a declaration of a housing emergency across the County that will happen very rapidly indeed.

It is the close access to electrical power supply that makes this site valuable to a data centre. They don’t need a port or a good road network and most even the largest only employ 30 people. Data handling and cloud storage will grow rapidly as ever more artificial intelligence and robotic management is developed but it will take ever more unending supplies of electricity to power that growth.

As massive users of power Data Centres of the scale proposed will take as much energy as the grids generator plant and north-sea link can produce leaving the North-East exposed to having to design a no-growth plan for the region in case dull windless days slow the input of green energy into the now ageing north-east grid system.

The planning decision on housing a Data Centre of the proposed size pushed out by Councillors Sanderon and Wearmouth in the media at Cambois needs to be taken out of Northumberland County Councils hands and decided nationally or when squeaky-bum time arrives and it will those same conservatives will fully blame the Labour administration that will run Northumberland County Council from May 2025.

And for those supporters of these two councillors from Morpeth who lead the secret cabinet regime, we will remind you that your flood defences built by a Labour administration won’t operate to the same level as normal without sufficient power. Therefore we encourage you to ask your Councillors why they are supporting the cloud storage of emails at Cambois when homes in Morpeth may be put in danger?

https://www.northsealink.com/

https://www.northumberlandgazette.co.uk/news/politics/mp-queries-job-creation-claims-of-ps10bn-data-centre-campus-proposal-at-former-britishvolt-site-in-northumberland-4594462

Questions in the house from Ian Lavery MP for Labour: Question 6-11.
https://commonsbusiness.parliament.uk/Document/87008/Pdf?subType=Standard

https://www.itv.com/news/tyne-tees/2024-04-26/israel-gaza-conflict-branded-as-sixth-form-politics-by-mayoral-candidate

https://www.areadevelopment.com/data-centers/Data-Centers-Q1-2015/impact-of-data-center-development-locally-2262766.shtml#:~:text=Data%20centers%20tend%20to%20be,anywhere%20between%20five%20and%2030

It's time ‘Advance’ Northumberland shook the failed County Council into action to save face

 

.

Unbelievable Council Meeting told all.

The codgers met after watching the May 1 2024 Full Council Meeting where The Leader of Council announced the giveaway ‘deal’ to sell off the Brit Volt site buyback clause for a ridiculously lousy 1.11% of the current estimated Data Centre project cost.

With Northumberland County Council slipping to be the second worst run Council in England according to the Government data exposed in the Times newspaper this week and as people from all over Northumberland know their disastrous involvement with so called levelling up projects and promised non-starters has taken this Tory led County Councils eye off the ball as their inability to keep places clean, green, potholes filled and tidy outside Morpeth and Ponteland is hated by most other residents county-wide.

Local opposition Councillors are having a field day, with Berwicks Georgina Hill completely embarrassing the Council Leader and his hapless Deputy when asking about this long term failure to deliver a single element of best value in the last seven years following all of the leaders promises to deliver more and better services on the public's behalf. With data supplied to Government illustrating failures in Planning, Waste management, Highways repairs and maintenance and Financial management.

The Leader responded with the wishy washy despondency of a man surrounded by the smell of shot foxes that he had lodged a complaint and the wrong data had been supplied to the Government in a failed attempt to gaslight the public. He also had the audacity to say that the Times should have warned him in!

These two exposures this week, the Brit Volt fire sale of land rights and the vipers tongue comment that somehow his own Government had been supplied the wrong figures for every service the Council delivered and delivers to and on behalf of the public except social care! No wonder the Government have reneged on promises to deliver a dualled A1 also promised on so many occasions by the MP for Berwick upon Tweed Anne-Marie Trevelyan eventually reaching the Scottish Border when the Financial management of a local authority which would act as the broker for this project falls further back than its usual weak position to second bottom of the pile of all Councils and has been exposed as pathetically desperate. A wandering service that Labour Councillors brought up into the public eye prior to the Council forcing through its budget with cash reserves stripped out to an all time low.

With audit expert Councillor Anne Dale asking to send the matters to the audit committee for the external auditor to have a look the dismal performance of the  Conservatives at a previous meeting, with this hanging over them the Conservatives awful business moved on, but: The fire sale is the absolute admission by the Conservatives on the Council that they have completely abandoned their promise to help create 8000 jobs in South East Northumberland and develop an institute instead of a shopping centre right in the middle of Blyth in the name of levelling up. This institute was supposed to train and service the 8000 jobs that would have spun off from Brit Volt and educate a well planned replacement workforce on an ongoing basis it's obviously no longer needed.

We at the codgers group meeting believe it's now time to abandon the institute build altogether and leave further-ed to other better positioned organisations who through Government interference and xenophobic resistance to foreign students in case they settle here have space in abundance to house the now meagre bit of training needed to service the few jobs Northumberland Conservatives have brought to South East Northumberland. With their abandonment of the Keel Row centre the Tories can boast 176 jobs to be created in 2025 at a wire factory and 203 lost in retail in the Town of Blyth in 2023. This is on the back of news that Blyth’s largest employer Dreagar is looking to re-site its headquarters away from the Town. A hapless position to be sat in.

The mess they have created in the Town of Blyth is using ‘Future High Streets Fund’ cash by the bucket full to develop a high street with no future as the Farmer, Glen Sanderson who runs the Council desires

It's time that fund was used for its rightful purpose and halt the re-development of the Keel Row centre using their own retail development arm of Advance Northumberland who have brought in new shops and kept Cramlington Manor Walks at the top of the league for the last eight years. It's so busy they now need to develop much more car parking to sustain business. Yet the Conservatives are closing a High Street in the County’s largest Town using public cash when retailers are looking for sites across the piece.

The Range who bought Wilko brand are looking to relaunch the brand on high streets this year, Peacocks, Next and Bon Marche are reportedly looking to get back onto high streets in larger Towns, Hobby Craft are moving from trade centres as high streets is the place to be for them as the move back to cash to manage family budgets is growing and online sales slowing down, with many more retailers including the Co-op and B&M’s bringing new shops smack bang into high streets across Britain moving back onto high streets from out of town, with Sainsbury’s and Tesco wanting to build medium size units in Town Centres where they do not have units aleady.

Advance Northumberland is in a terrific place to grow Blyth back to a centre that people want to spend in and the people of the Town in numerous surveys over the years also want a covered in Market so Northumberland Conservatives get off your high horses and deliver what's wanted by real people who live in Towns in our Future High Streets.

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/8a31933e-b16e-44df-b745-0d5e5108eec3?shareToken=a9e6331a245aae6206ba3159fad52fe6

Tories have hoisted an environmental disaster onto Ashington, Bedlington, Blyth and Newbiggin.

 

With no plans to offset the heat output of Europe's largest Data Centre

Doing the ‘Deal’ to offload the Britvolt site cheaply without thinking through the ramifications for people living near or taking advice on the devastating effect this site will leave the next two councils voted in in Northumberland with little or no chance to build up or offset the climate change disaster being hoisted onto communities without even discussing the matter with those who represent them.

Northumberland Conservatives whose myopic view of a Council asset in Cambois is how much cash can we get to use on short term fixes to keep our spend, spend, spend habits alive and kicking. When in reality they should have brought local communities along with them by discussing options on climate change offset plans as the heat dissipation of this data centre, already published by experts who estimate it will be somewhere in the regions of 300 Mw/hr. That's enough to power a heat pump on average consumption of 1700w/hr in every home in Northumberland and half the homes in the neighbouring Council of North Tyneside.

Whatever vision Morpeth and Ponteland Conservatives have of the River Blyth basin area where they have given up on creating 8000 jobs and decided in their usual secret manner to only bring 30 jobs into view in the future, the mudflats in the river Blyth estuary are home to a myriad of birds and critical to the environment shellfish and tidal marine animals such as crabs and worms which sustain the varied and attractive wildlife corridor of the river Blyth, That fragile environment which is quite unique in the North-East is loved by wildlife and naturalists as well as commercial inshore fishermen and anglers who collect bait to ply their trade and hobby.

The rising heat from the proposed massive data centre may drive away birdlife and change the climate around the Townships near to the site yet the Council have avoided discussing this serious greenissue and instead taken an opportunity to grab the cash along with the headlines and like the coal barons of the past not given any thought to the ramifications or damage they will cause people who dwell in Northumberland most populous area.

This Conservative very secretive Council, led for the last seven years by Farmers are, using their parlance, placing an empty fertiliser bag in the wet grass to catch unsuspecting walkers who they don’t want near their environment, but the public who live in the area surrounding the site which grasping Conservative hands have sold do care and will be pressing to find out how a council who declared a climate emergency three years ago in a blaze of publicity and then dumped its delivery onto Town and Parish Councils via a ‘toolkit’ so that they could spend the cash to offset the emergency elsewhere are even going to get the ‘weasel words’ together to offset this impending disaster of their own making.

https://www.northumberland.gov.uk/Climate-Change/Climate-Change.aspx

https://www.northumberland.gov.uk/NorthumberlandCountyCouncil/media/News/2022/April/Northumberland-Town-and-Parish-Council-Climate-Change-Toolkit.pdf

https://www.techrepublic.com/article/why-data-centers-fail-to-bring-new-jobs-to-small-towns/#:~:text=While%20typical%20company%20headquarters%20can,a%202014%20report%20from%20CBRE.