Glen’s Delighted to be spending £419 per tree to improve Counties Carbon Footprint?

Councillor Glen Sanderson the head of local services and all matters green at Northumberland County Council department has been awarded through the Forestry Commission’s Urban Tree Challenge Fund £265,000 for a new two-year tree planting programme. 

The initiative will involve 633 trees being planted at 29 locations across Cramlington, Seghill, Seaton Delaval, Blyth, Bedlington, Choppington, Prudhoe and Hexham.

The project aims to improve the county’s urban tree cover, improving the landscape and making them more appealing areas for recreation and for wildlife. The extra trees will also make a contribution to carbon capture. 

His statement in his recent press release reads as follows: Councillor Glen Sanderson, Cabinet Member for Environment and Local Services, said: “We’re delighted to have secured this funding. After declaring our climate emergency earlier this year, we must do everything we can to reduce our carbon footprint.

This unbelievable level of expenditure per tree shows a vital difference between Northumberland Labour Party’s ‘Green Credentials’ and that of Northumberland Conservatives.

During 2015 the Council unanimously supported the introduction of a tree management policy that was an element of its planning core strategy planning activity, an activity that was completely halted by the incoming Tories in 2017.

The policy allowed an application to Government by a private landowner to plant 600,000 on Doddington Moor, Englands largest private forestry project. It had a number of hurdles to get over but was approved and planting began on this scheme in 2018 that will capture 120,000 tonnes of carbon seriously reducing the Northumberland County carbon footprint.

That reduction will be further enhanced by the planting of 1,000,000 trees by the Forestry Commission themselves designed to capture 200,000 tonnes of carbon each year on 500Ha spread over three sites in the County that will help the County reach its carbon neutral target over the next 10 years.

The Forestry Commission although making a huge investment in their growth plans will not be spending at the same level as Councillor Sanderson which would cost them £419,000,000, as their whole national budget to manage all of Englands tree stock in their estate is only £52M per year, clearly illustrating Councillor Sanderson is another of the Tory wasters sitting in their about to become ‘Crystal Palace’ in Morpeth when its new £16M Conservatory is finished.

For a Council showing an £11M underspend in its accounts that pulled the plug on its sure start schemes supposedly due to a lack of cash through austerity, Cllr Sanderson’s spend on trees is savage amusement indeed.

£419 per tree is an abomination and he should hang his head in shame forever, the Forestry Commission have a list of approved growers who sell Councils saplings of the mighty oak for 32p each.

With the money he received in the latest award he could be planning to plant 828,000 oak saplings on highways and Council owned reclaimed land which when combined with the Forestry Commissions ambitious plans shift the County carbon footprint into a negative position or share the measure across the whole of the North of Tyne combined authority area and when unified with North Tyneside and Newcastles recently enhanced planting program bring the whole North of Tyne very close to being carbon neutral by 2030 an initiative championed by Ashington Labour Councillor Lynne Grimshaw and one we hope the Mayor of the Combined Authority will support her green ideals.

Notes:

http://www.doddingtonnorthforest.com/home

https://www.northumberland.gov.uk/News/2019/Oct/Hundreds-of-new-trees-to-be-planted-in-county.aspx

http://www.treesplease.co.uk/product/quercus-robur-english-oak/

https://3fatpigs.co.uk/fruit-trees-bushes/

Beechwood tree nursery where the most expensive tree is £72.

Deprivation? Northumberland’s poor, now much worse off.

The release of the 2019 national deprivation figures show that when measured against the indices of multiple deprivation ever more people in Northumberland have slipped into being less well off.

Taking a look at the information issued on deprivation, being in the top 10% or 20% isn’t good as being at number one in this list means that you live in an area that’s bottom of the pile. Its simply Government spin to confuse the public at large and we see that both Jeremy Corbyn and Tom Watson have made public statements that they want to change the definition of the indices and make the figures easier for people to understand.

88% of Council wards nationally have remained in the top 20% of deprived wards, but luckily for some, 12% of Council areas nationally have shown major improvements, so why can’t they all.

They can’t because of a number of factors but the deciding factor in whether a Council can and does place itself in a position of being able to improve the lives of residents is as always, ‘the will to do it’. The current figures show that our Council doesn’t have that will.

The measure of deprivation splits the Communities we recognise into areas of approximately 600- 650 homes known as low level super output areas. They cross Council wards so do have mixed names but for those who live in the named areas they know where they are.

The most deprived area in the County is 650 homes in Cowpen/Croft which has slipped 472 places towards the foot of the table, falling from 605 when the Tories took power in May 2017 down to 133 today, with all three communities that make up Kitty Brewster falling down the ladder of success making it the most deprived whole Ward in Northumberland.
There are also some huge dives in other areas with Lynemouth dropping 1592 places with ever more people living in poverty and deprivation, the worst performance since Castle Morpeth District Council organised that area, with big shocks in Newbiggin by the Sea, Bedlington East, parts of Ashington and the Isabella/Wensleydale communities being dragged further into the mire.

The Council will argue that some areas have improved, including Cramlington West which has had a major housing scheme opened up its a commuter area for Newcastle with its higher paid employment and that has boosted local wealth but in the main the results have been completely on the dark side and the Council needs to change tack entirely if it wants to see the majority of its residents move out of the poverty trap.

Of course we hear often enough from the Morpeth and Ponteland cluster of Councillors that people in some parts of the County believe deprivation exists in areas where your neighbour doesn’t have a Jag and a Merc. sitting on their drive or where their housekeeper and au pair only work part time but the reality is that since 2017 the Council has allowed its residents to become less well off across most of the South East of the County and have done nothing to aid them at all.

The Tories will of course say that have decided to invest in building some new schools and spending £millions on refurbishing County Hall in Morpeth. In reply we the laymen must point out that its easy to borrow capital finance and build schools and refurbish old offices but its much, much harder to do things that will alter the lives of people.

The positioning of families and neighbourhoods has been made much worse by the complete neglect of services by the Tories on the County Council, the stopping of sure start schemes, the slashing of health visitor numbers, the run down of the third sector, the haemorrhage of cash from youth services and Councillors from the ruling party following the words and actions of Ian Duncan Smith to the letter and using their powers to ensure Northumberland develops a massive underclass. If funded correctly the services organised by the Council and its attached community health services can improve the lot for everyone but the will is definitely not there.
 

 

 

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.