Aldi an anchor! Who’s leg are you pulling?

With September being recorded as the worst trading month on the high street for 20yr we are served with the news by one of the Bedlington Tory coalition independents that his team at Northumberland County Council have secured an anchor store to save the high street in Bedlington and the long awaited ‘Pipers Place’ development will at last get off the ground two years and two months late.

But will it?

In July 2019 the Grocer and the Daily Express if you can ever believe anything the DE prints, told the public that ALDI were primed to become the third largest supermarket chain in both the US and the UK with a 21 store UK expansion prior to xmas 2019 being announced to bring their property stock up to 1200 stores.

Aldi’s planning team when checking where to site its new stores use ‘Location Analytics’ to determine their sites of choice and luckily for Bedlington, just like Lidl who are already on site, use were told, a three mile radius to develop their second string of data from known as  Psychographics.


 Whats that then?

According to Aldi themselves:
‘Psychographics broadens the scope from focusing on who a person is, to what that person believes in. Psychographics identifies lifestyle habits, values, attitudes, and other defining attributes.’

Our Laymen team have undertaken a bit of research to define how that wonderful statement links in with deciding on the location for a supermarket.

Its actually quite simple, they draw a radius line on a map and check the deprivation data within their radius. There is a sound basis in fact that in areas of deprivation the majority of residents do not shop online for their groceries and instead rely on low cost choice at their local supermarket.

Luckily for the Tories and their coalition Independent group from Bedlington, both Cowpen and Kitty Brewster wards the most deprived wards in the County of Northumberland sit within the correct radius and are connected by bus services to the site on offer in Bedlington.

Aldi can site their stores within three months of agreeing the price for their site and its been said they have taken 1.5 acre of land at Pipers Place.

The question now has to be asked will Advance Northumberland open up the site onto the High Street for a single discounter or will Aldi insist on opening up onto Schalksmuhle Road where the entrances to Morrisons and Lidl are well established. Those businesses are currently sharing trade and the now well developed competition has helped local people secure best value from their weekly shopping experiences in both stores.

The cost of opening up onto Bedlington Front Street is enormous due to its geography and topography and unless a quality housing provider has made advances to gain a foothold on this site we as laymen are not sure that it’s a viable proposition until a host of other and probably better anchor stores are found to sit on a site where business collapse over the years has been the accepted norm with both the Co-op and Tesco failing in this position.

So in conclusion or is that back to where we started this short article, September 2019 recorded the worst trading figures on the High Street for 20yrs.

Library Panic and Secret Council meetings at Northumberland County Council

Council announces the predicted outcome ‘Ten Weeks’ before consultation ends.

With the administration of Northumberland County Council beginning to notice it is running rapidly towards its demise with only 10 decision making Council meetings left before the secret Council has to meet its makers in the form of a local government election. We as laymen are beginning to notice panic setting in at County Hall as well as ever more notice being taken of criticism from both opposition Councillors who are creating better exposure outcomes than the administration due to the secret way this Council acts and the noise from groups such as ourselves and others like ‘the voice of the north team and the planet group’ as the administration swings with the criticism from all sides.


This latest park-full of swings takes the biscuit when it comes to wind bending, with the announcement this week that more cash is to be spent on Morpeth’s new Leisure Centre a cudgel we took up several months ago after reading Labour’s last priced up manifesto, but the swing that is most noticeable is the launch of the new library app that is designed to help cut £200,000 from the service two weeks into a twelve week consultation designed to enable the public to help shape the outcomes for the service into the future.

We noticed that save our libraries campaigners had launched a petition on change.org at the same time the cuts were announced at the one-party cabinet who lord over the County and other groups including us began to openly criticise the well known way in which the current incumbents use consultation to achieve cuts through pre-determined outcomes.

On this occasion the noise on social media has been too much and the Council has announced how your library service is to look well into the future through a major launch of its new app. The use of this app allows professional staff to be cut and the library service be run by a part time volunteer force across most of the County.

This was certainly a strong talk over the dinner table in our house with my family enraged with the gall of it all and when contacting the other laymen it seems universally accepted that we expose the matter in this article.

The newly launched app can be found here and the petition link sits below.

https://www.northumberland.gov.uk/News/2019/Oct/BorrowBox-%E2%80%93-Your-library-in-one-app-is-here.aspx

https://www.change.org/p/northumberland-county-council-stop-northumberland-tories-slashing-your-library-service?fbclid=IwAR2LW3z2CiWhN2gYM2k9ojLw4iqhe-gjc6TGmBmNrFCytWxbkggEU8_iquM&use_react=false
 

We Love Jobs Fairs

But questions need to be answered about this one?

This Friday 18^th October 2019 there’s a Jobs Fair to be held in the Wentworth Leisure Centre in Hexham.

50 top class local and national companies are hoping to recruit the staff they need and the outcome will hopefully lead to increased employment right across the Tyne Valley area.

Its being promoted by the MP for the area Parliamentary under secretary for the Department of Work and Pensions Guy Opperman.

To publicise the event a flyer has been produced in its thousands and distributed widely across Tynedale and Northumberland as well as a huge levels of twitter, blog and facebook activity to advertise this wonderful event which will open up opportunities for many people as widely as possible and as it states on the flyer the event is supported by Northumberland County Council as it should be.

But this flyer isn’t just an advert, it’s a political leaflet entitled Guy Opperman MP’s TYNEDALE JOBS FAIR the flyer contains the the MP’s political imprint promoted by his agent Gordon Stewart a County Councillor from the Prudhoe area, an ex-policeman and the political leader of Northumberland Conservatives board.

The County Council is a Tory run organisation and Councillor Stewart has been pictured with arms on the shoulders of the in-crowd of that organisation on many occasions.

The questions that arise immediately from the release of this flyer is: What is the support from the County Council, a Council who is in charge of the physical operation of elections in the Tynedale Area?

Have the County Council supported this event and of course the production of this political flyer either in kind or financially?

What role has County Councillor Gordon Stewart played in harnessing or garnering the support of Northumberland County Council for his promoted flyer on behalf of his MP?

Was advice sought from either the elections department of the County Council its Chief Executive or its legal department prior to the decision being made by the Council to support this event and its flyer?

These questions and many more need to be answered by Councillor Stewart and the County Council both fairly and honestly and not as the secret council they are does on so many occasions stay silent and sweep the matters under the carpet.
 

 

 

Government announce 'support promises removal' to organisations through an attack on refugees.

Its only been a couple of weeks since we laymen brought up the issue of the replacement for EU regional and national funding in the form of the UK shared prosperity fund and how we hoped our suspicions that Sajid Javid would claw back huge sums of money from Councils in order to finish off local democracy once and for all if we crash out of Europe would not occur.

Recently our fears were finally upheld through an article in the Guardian newspaper regarding the removal of any future support through the UK shared prosperity fund entitled: No-deal puts refugee funding at risk

The UK Government has told the Refugee Council that, in the event of a no-deal Brexit, millions of pounds of European funding to support vulnerable refugees will be lost. The Council, which was initially assured that the grants would be secure post-Brexit, said the threatened withdrawal was a “disgraceful U-turn.”

This hardening up of the Governments position shows that the supposed ending of austerity was as we always believed a sham and the halt to internal spending for one financial year by Government departments will not happen and austerity still sits in place.

If the nation crashes out of Europe which now seems to be a very likely situation the loss of employment will be immense and we will descend rapidly into recession hence the reason for the announcement of more police officers to be recruited. As the UK spins out of control the cash we should all share will be used to control the people. It looks ever more like the nation will go back in TARDISTIC time to the miners dispute only this time the Government will be fighting women who will be desperate to feed their families.

 

 

Government announce 'support promises removal' to organisations through an attack on refugees.

Its only been a couple of weeks since we laymen brought up the issue of the replacement for EU regional and national funding in the form of the UK shared prosperity fund and how we hoped our suspicions that Sajid Javid would claw back huge sums of money from Councils in order to finish off local democracy once and for all if we crash out of Europe would not occur.

Recently our fears were finally upheld through an article in the Guardian newspaper regarding the removal of any future support through the UK shared prosperity fund entitled: No-deal puts refugee funding at risk

The UK Government has told the Refugee Council that, in the event of a no-deal Brexit, millions of pounds of European funding to support vulnerable refugees will be lost. The Council, which was initially assured that the grants would be secure post-Brexit, said the threatened withdrawal was a “disgraceful U-turn.”

This hardening up of the Governments position shows that the supposed ending of austerity was as we always believed a sham and the halt to internal spending for one financial year by Government departments will not happen and austerity still sits in place.

If the nation crashes out of Europe which now seems to be a very likely situation the loss of employment will be immense and we will descend rapidly into recession hence the reason for the announcement of more police officers to be recruited. As the UK spins out of control the cash we should all share will be used to control the people. It looks ever more like the nation will go back in TARDISTIC time to the miners dispute only this time the Government will be fighting women who will be desperate to feed their families.

 

 

Bloodthirsty Councillors Criticised for ‘Gentlemanly’ Attitudes.

As the Northumberland layman contributor who lives in the most rural location in our beautiful County I spend a great deal of time on the telephone each day making contact with my neighbours, family, local businesses and the authorities. As I don’t have access to high speed broadband yet (although the authorities are working hard to bring it on) it has taken me a little while to pick up the noise on social media surrounding this matter.

A report in the Newcastle Journal on 19^th September 2019 explained the activities at the Morpeth and District local area Council on the 16^th September, where the subject brought up by the Gentlemen farming Councillors who run Northumberland County Council, Chairman Richard Dodd, Leader of Council Peter Jackson and Glen Sanderson, head of Local Services three of the pack who cut down the number of democratic meetings of the County Council to suit their money making business interests and the agricultural calendar in order that they are not brought to task regarding their seemingly hooray henry decision making by the public at large. The subject they wanted to discuss at this publicly reported meeting was the Policing of poaching from their land.

Not content with acting themselves in front of the press, boasting that their businesses include the bloodthirsty activities of hunting shooting and fishing they unbelievably criticised the Police for not personally informing them of whom their local policeman is.

This release of how their gouty lifestyles have evolved since taking office as a Councillor on the public’s behalf is what led to the crescendo of activity on social media particularly from the South East of the County and some of the Counties most deprived areas. People who may not be averse to the Country lifestyle are disgusted at the laziness of these Gentlemen Councillors and Farmers who employ staff to work their land whilst they take part in their pursuits and tweed and barbour coated activities all the time holding positions at the County Council which warrant the supply of secretaries and teams of admin staff at their disposal. My friends in the Morpeth Rural areas all have access to high speed broadband and I suspect their farms would be some of the first to be equipped with this communication medium yet here we have three snobby people living impressive lifestyle’s who admit they cannot press the keys on their PC, use a telephone nor even ask the staff who work hard for them on a daily basis to phone the Police to find out who their local bobby is.

I only have the telephone and basic internet to help me, I am not a Councillor yet I made it my business to speak with a local policeman following the last reportable criminal activity near my home and the Police have been very kind and kept a little bit of contact with me ever since.

I’m sure the County Council who offer evening classes through their adult training arm on every subject under the sun will have a course on ‘how to feel confident using the phone’. It’s important, in fact essential that these three people who are obviously too posh to dirty their hands or pick up germs from a telephone receiver are sent on that course.
 

 

 

Deprivation concentrated in post-industrial areas of North and North East

A new Government report shows that the that the most dense concentrations of deprived neighbourhoods in England are still to be found in the post-industrial areas of the North and North East, such as Middlesbrough, Liverpool and Blackpool.

The Seaside village Jaywick in Essex, has been named the most deprived area overall for the third time in a row since 2010. Meanwhile wealthy incomers moving into new-build apartments in regenerated neighbourhoods has altered the socio-economic profile of some of London’s traditionally most-deprived areas.

The latest official indices of deprivation in England shows that the high concentrations of deprivation found historically in the boroughs of Tower
Hamlets, Westminster and Islington appear to be becoming significantly diluted. However, one inner London council leader said the deprivation data did not appear to reflect the reality of poverty in local communities or the pressure on local authorities who had to deal with its effects.

In Northumberland, the Unitary Council and its attached partner Clinical Commissioning Group from the County NHS have ignored the Government invitation to locate the pockets of serious deprivation that can be found across this huge County, allowing it to slip to 122^nd in the current list. This major cock-up by the Tory administration in County Hall and their medical allies who are hiding the truth on so many issues will see deprived areas across Northumberland lose £Millions in aid to help the less well off while the number of families who need to use food banks and the number of children who are undernourished grows.