Empty Councillor Mindset Has to pull its socks up, change and deliver.

 

Northumberland, the most sparsely populated County in England has had its meager local plan questioned by Labours deputy leader Angela Rayner.

She has been given the opportunity to improve the number of available homes outside London to meet the needs of the nation and deliver a mix of private, social and affordable homes, creating jobs for life in a now static building trade and grow the nation’s economy from within.

Northumberland County Council is famous among local authorities through the view of its Conservative team leader Councillor Richard Dodd who during the formation of its Core Strategy spoke about affordable homes when he pointed out the ‘homes in Darras Hall (central to the north-East’s millionaire belt) are affordable for some’. That attitude has continued ever since. 

Those same conservatives removed the Council's core strategy from inspection by Government in 2017 pulling the plug on its own government and prince of Wales garden village scheme into the bargain then three years later replaced it with the now questionable local plan.

The Council, which under the last Labour administration delivered 100 council houses each year, hasn't delivered any since the Tories took over this Council in 2017.

It also has a massive second home problem and over 2600 void properties that could be brought back into use but it seems housing need isn’t a priority for the Tories in Northumberland having let its list of families in greatest need grow to over 14,000. An absolute disgrace for a county so sparsely populated. Northumberland is home to a real housing crisis indeed, please mind the pun.

With the Councils plan seemingly so weak that it is allowing villages to die and schools close due to lack of both families in residence and massively lower populations during autumn and winter due to the out of kilter number of second homes it’s a good thing to have Angela Rayner pressurise this Council into ensuring development is paramount to council thinking and policy decisions help people get a roof over their heads with sofa surfing outnumbering water sports persons in a county with Britains third longest coastline.

https://www.hexham-courant.co.uk/news/24499755.possible-rise-northumberlands-housing-targets-criticised/

Northumberland Tories shown up as hopeless financial managers.

 

Four days after a tv interview regarding the multi- million pound removal of waste matter from Lynemouth beach, the Tory leader of Northumberland County Council Glen Sanderson is soundly captured by the local press.

Standing near to the rubbish tipped on a former Castle Morpeth Council beach a Council Glen Sanderson was also in charge of,  he told the north east public when questioned regarding the cost of this project that Northumberland County Council could afford to undertake this job due to the financial prudence of his council.

The financial fiasco of Northumberland County Council has been in question since 2017 with a myriad of temporary and/ or absentee financial officers hired by the Tories who lost the services of an international auditor during their tenure and whose current external auditor is uncovering items that we codgers are sure that the Councils secret cabinet has brushed under the carpet.

But the latest matter that we’re sure his Tory group mates and secret cabinet colleagues would like to have his lips sewn together for is the recent exposure only four days after his prudence statement in sunny Lynemouth that the reopening of the Northumberland rail line to passenger services is going to cost £130 million more than the supposed prudent Tories had budgeted for.

That debt, and it is debt, will sit as a burden onto the back of residents in Northumberland for many years to come as even the self ego inflated prudent farmer Glen Sanderson who has hoisted England's highest Council Tax onto the residents of the County he controls doesn’t have £130m in the groups cash box sitting under his desk at the very expensive to run and almost empty County Hall in Morpeth.

https://tinyurl.com/yzd9a2mm

Narrowing Cowpen Road? Conservative chaos embracing commercial destruction.

 

With people beginning to notice surveyors linked to Northumberland single party cabinet, measuring every inch of the County’s busiest highway, questions are beginning to be asked by businesses and road users alike.

With the same cabinet members hiding behind the last Government’s levelling up con destroying trade and the opportunity for commercial growth in Blyth Town Centre they are now making moves to damage trade and life chances for ever more families in Blyth as they have decided to lift the stone from their plans to also kill off commerce on Cowpen Road.

Continuing to shelter behind ‘levelling up’ on Cowpen Road by shrinking its width to allow cyclists enjoy a third share of this very dangerous highway coupled with removing safety islands and right hand turning lanes exposing pedestrians and locals to join the melee. This decision will expose the myriad of school children whose journeys to school include Cowpen Road to dodge juggernauts and flying emergency vehicles while the joint pedestrian and cycle lane sits as empty as the heads who believe this unwanted safety feature will benefit jobs and deliveries across Blyth for most of the day while motor traffic will stand still for many more hours than at present.

A recent full council meeting at County Hall in Morpeth appeared to ditch the development of a Cowpen relief road for another decade, drivers and industry which relies on Cowpen Road will be stifled by the same Conservative anti Blyth campaigners who have pushed a culture centre and destroyed instead of accepting the challenge of improvement its shopping precinct have shown since 2017 that their interest lies in Morpeth and Ponteland and are using Government money to push work and business away from Blyth.

https://www.northumberland.gov.uk/NorthumberlandCountyCouncil/media/Economy-and-Regeneration/Energising%20Blyth/Bebside-to-Town-Centre-Cycle-Corridor.pdf

Proposals submitted for £6.5m investment in Morpeth high school? No wonder broken Tories have begun ‘double charging’ for street weeds in Cramlington?

 

Following the proposal by the Conservative-only secret cabinet based at County Hall in Morpeth to sink hard to find public money into an academy school in Morpeth we codgers find well known environmental activist and twin hatted Councillor supporting his tory led Town Council to spend more cash doing what his prime Council has already charged the highest Council Tax in England to undertake.

Councillor Wayne Daley who is a principled person with scruples as his desertion of his post of Deputy Leader of Northumberland County Council when everyone but the Police were involved in a huge and well reported nationally, workforce bullying scandal shows testament to, has succumbed to populism in order to save his political income as a councillor by double charging his residents. 

Town and parish Councils were invited by the County Council to have the opportunity to engage in additional grass cutting across all or certain areas of County Council managed land. Before choosing this now exposed populist route because his prime authority is wasting and hemorrhaging cash on an almost weekly basis in Morpeth and Ponteland reducing service delivery everywhere else, Wayne Daley and his Council REFUSED to pay for additional land maintenance and demanded that the other two thirds of the Tory Group based at Morpeth County Hall spent more on grass cutting in Cramlington because they accumulated more Council tax from that Town than anywhere else.

He and his Tory cohorts on Cramlington Town Council have now begun spraying street weeds using contractors with what's been said on social media is the highly toxic plant poison ‘Clinic’, or at least a derivative of it, which isn’t toxic to bees but is destructive to aquatic organisms. Surely even the normally positive environmental activist Councillor Wayne Daley should realise that additional spraying in the streets over and above the calculated average designed by horticulturalists working for the County Council will enter Cramlington’s water courses and weaken the local environment.

Councillor Daley and his Councils new populist approach to spending more and more of the Parish precept collected by Cramlington Town Council and his Town Councils refusal to join in with additional grounds maintenance spend from 2021 do not seem to sit together yet Councillor Daley is painting this waste of cash as a betterment of his Councils yearly raids on householders incomes. 

Come on Wayne? Even you as a true blue lost conservative must realise that by not stopping the waste of cash in Morpeth and Ponteland, the possible privatisation of the Council cultural services, the rundown of Arts and Theatre funding and of course the wobbly grounds maintenance program not supported previously by your Town Council and your team at Cramlington openly criticising the broken and out of control County Council Tory group in power, you have simply opened yourself and your Cramlington Conservative group to ridicule and scorn! As well as potentially poisoning our waterways.

https://www.chroniclelive.co.uk/news/north-east-news/northumberland-morpeth-kevi-school-capacity-29565477

https://www.northumberlandgazette.co.uk/news/politics/council/deputy-leader-and-cabinet-member-quit-northumberland-county-council-in-turbulent-week-for-authority-2941769

https://www.cramlingtontowncouncil.gov.uk/stepping-up-weed-control/

https://www.agrigem.co.uk/media/documents/Clinic_ACE_labelinfo.pdf?

https://www.cramlingtontowncouncil.gov.uk/grass-cutting-survey-do-you-have-issues-with-the-standard-of-grass-cutting-in-your-area/

https://www.cramlingtontowncouncil.gov.uk/town-council-to-freeze-council-tax/

‘Levelling Up’ 2019 Tory Manifesto Promises are no longer locally supported.

 

With cinema attendance intrinsically linked like most of the leisure and night time economy to the amount of surplus cash families can muster, cinema is a luxury that may be slightly on the up since the pandemic but using public house turnover and closures as a measure will not recover until the shockingly bad effects of the Tories economic crisis is forgotten and wages begin to creep back up to matching affordability and families begin to feel like they can sponsor and expensive family trip out on a regular basis.

With the regional newspaper the Chronicle printing the story that in order to fill the famous ‘Ashington Hole’ Northumberland’s Conservative led County Council is still ploughing on with building a cinema with public money against the rising volume of the public voice.

We Codgers believe its to cover over not only the famous hole but to savagely halt any opportunity to revive Ashington through the Labour Party’s frozen plans of building a new Council Office on the site bringing 500 workers daily into the centre of town to revive its commercial heart.in order to protect their ugly almost empty monolith of County Hall hidden on the outskirts of Morpeth, built to house almost 6000 office staff. Those numbers have dwindled gradually since 1981 and now anyone working in that monolith can have more room at their workplace than the current space requirements in planning terms for a family of 9.

The voices against the cinema have been reminding people that the same current yet in its broken death throws Tory Council is developing a giant three screen cinema in Blyth and the Council owned company Advance Northumberland which runs the Cramlington’s Manor Walks centre is also home to multi-screen complex and open competition from your landlord is not something many in the cinema industry like to bump up against.

The introduction of Labour’s long term plan to bring passenger rail services back into the heart of Ashington almost complete; (The last labour administration at County Hall paid heavily for the GRIP studies to secure Government funding for this line), when coupled with the recent granting of planning permission to develop a 4000 student University Campus very close to the centre of Town is a catalyst for Ashington’s growth. 

Many students are expected to travel by train to be educated outside the city environment so as to not face the cost pressures associated with City learning. The student numbers will certainly help the local economy and although small spenders in retail terms will propel Ashington upwards but if Labour were to revive their plans and bring permanent jobs into the heart of Ashington and the Council’s customers who need to see them travel into Town by train then its former healthier high street days would revive in the new modern fashion as permanent workers and their visitors are known to shop near to their employment of visited work spaces to save their own precious home leisure time.

So in the opinion of our Codgers team lets keep the voice of a future potential failure of a another levelling up Cinema project down and let the next Labour administration at County Hall from 2025 revive their plans and raise the detrimental doldrums of poverty and deprivation from Ashington and go for growth and not glamour projects.

https://www.chroniclelive.co.uk/news/north-east-news/ashington-cinema-plan-portland-park-29566918