Are these motions Hate Crimes?

In a county that has one of the smallest Black and Minority Ethnic populations in Great Britain, 1.4%, we Laymen have noticed that the current Northumberland County Council administration who at its last Council meeting opposed a motion to protect staff employment rights and services to the communities across the county, now have two highly controversial motions on their agenda for what we believe to be political purposes.

With 3.6% of the County’s population being ‘born in Scotland’ two and a half times more people than those who recognise themselves as being part of our Black and Ethnic populations, a Scotophile motion calling the possibility of separation from the UK union as a threat that is designed to appoint leading Conservative councillors to steer the population against an anti-brexit population dwelling on the North side of the Border, has been submitted to become Council policy. The historian within our ranks believes that although spies operated on behalf of England in Scotland during the various Jacobite periods and during the English Civil War its thought that members of Councils and local dignitaries have not ‘kept and eye’ on the Scots since the 1680’s. There's also a motion from an administration who this year stopped its holocaust services on supposed cost grounds to re-affirm its condemnation of all forms of racism and hate crime, singling out Anti-Semitism.

In January 2017 the Council accepted a policy on Equality that was designed to clearly state the Councils position with regard to both Communities and Staff so why have Northumberland Conservatives singled out Anti-Semitism if not for political purposes.

Reading Northumberland’s accepted and well supported policy and if re-affirmation was required then why has Islamaphobia or the bullying of women not been singled out, two issues the Tories have been painted with both nationally and locally Is it because they can’t blame Jeremy Corbyn for it. Or is it simply because the Leader of Council, Peter Jackson has the largest ethnic minority groups and the most single women living in his ward of Ponteland South with Heddon? A ward that the dreadful planning episodes and costs to the Council taxpayers to protect Councillor Jackson from his fortunes being exposed to litigation runs as a fiefdom.

Even some of the most zealous Conservatives surely can’t support these motions without asking questions about this Tory Councils stance on equality in general, with the high profile Amber Rudd accusing the Tories nationally of ardent bullying among others and the stance they are taking by accepting these ‘old fashioned’ motions onto their agenda will certainly cost the Tories votes both in Berwick and Hexham where their positions are weakening daily.

The noise from their own membership and supporters on these issues and the acceptance of them as being ‘Valid Motions’ should surely make removal from the agenda essential and we the laymen wish to ask, are these motions ‘Hate crimes in their own right’?.

https://www.northumberland.gov.uk/NorthumberlandCountyCouncil/media/About-the-Council/equality/Equality-info-report-Jan17.pdf

Prudhoe Prison, Residents are up in arms.

The recent news that the Cumbria, Northumberland, Tyne and Wear NHS foundation trust wish to change the dynamics of their mental health unit at Ferndale in Prudhoe to a medium secure unit has come as a shock to residents.

Their shock has been further enhanced by the news that their local County Councillor, Gordon Stewart is in the Hexham Courant fully supportive of the changes and to discolour the people’s view of the project further concerns expressed on social media by local residents show that Councillor Stewart is a very influential member of the administration at County Hall and the agent for the local MP Guy Opperman. People believe they have been overlooked and the planning permission needed to make this change is already set in stone.

The changes suggested are to make Ferndale into a medium secure unit with provision for inpatient treatment and care for young people with complex mental health problems who have been in contact with the criminal justice system, who present a serious risk to themselves or others and have a reasonable potential to abscond.

Residents of Prudhoe and Wylam area have openly commented on the issue and we believe letters were passed out at this weeks meeting of Prudhoe Town Council to Councillor Stewart making it clear that the residents of this part of the County do not want this change at all.

The only area brought up to speed by the Trust and Councillor Stewart appears to be the residents of Humbles Wood leaving the residents of wider Prudhoe in the dark. A message from one resident asks why those living next to the site in Cottier Grange, Park Lane and Moor Grange weren’t brought in at an early stage and why Prudhoe High School has not been brought in as a prime consultee. They have also asked why these young people aren’t being treated at Netherton Park which is already home to a young persons secure unit.

We’re sure Councillor Stewart and his Campaigning MP will roll out some excuse on social media but really this treatment of residents is undeniably objectionable.

Will failed ‘Bids’ lead to shortchanging Blyth?

As we move forward towards the general election,
we will notice all sorts of claims from Northumberland Conservatives, for instance a local town Councillor from Blyth Daniel Carr made a claim on social media just after the House of Lords cleared the calling of the election that Blyth had been awarded £25m by the Government and that people should rally around and tell him how to spend it, this was a completely false and spurious claim.

The truth is that a forum partnership has been set up in the Town of Blyth Northumberland to see how its prospects can be improved through the public and commercial sector working in harmony together.

Following a series of meetings it was agreed by the parties involved to put in a bid to the Governments regeneration funding mechanisms in an attempt to bring in a small, by development standards £25m, to form the basis of funding matches with the regional agency, the LEP, the County Council, whilst involving both the the major energy companies moving into the port of Blyth and the long term commercial operators sited around the Town.

The initial bid failed at the first hurdle and the only town offered cash in the County of Northumberland was Hexham, which may happen to have a slowing high street but doesn’t have the deprivation levels found in the town of Blyth with six of its eight wards sitting in the 10% of most deprived wards in the U.K., but it does have some of the closest links with the farming communities in the County, who will suffer most from Boris Johnson’s version of BREXIT and its beleaguered MP Guy Opperman is an ardent leaver and quietly despised by his communities through his opposition to the safeguarding of the positions of the major families in his constituency.

This picture in words shows how political the doling out of Government funds by the Tories has become. Blyth, possibly the most needy Town in the County has been ravaged since May 2017 through the closure or removal of support for agencies geared towards helping in deprived areas and the delivery of nothing directly by the Tory led County Council at all apart from promises that they may deliver items in the future after the 2021 local government elections!

The Government then moved Blyth into a second string ‘bidding list’ and threw a peppercorn amount of cash towards the County Council to formulate a scheme that may possibly win a £25m bid against 50 other towns across the Country.

This new scheme is being led by Councillor Richard Wearmouth a man who since his election in 2017 was tasked by the Conservative Group at County Hall to manage and grow the Councils Business Improvement District schemes, a task he has magnificently failed in. One scheme in Hexham and probably another reason Hexham has had some cash thrown towards it was shut down following the owners of commercial businesses being prepared to go to jail rather than support a scheme pushed by their MP and pay bills that would in many cases bankrupt them and for which they felt they would gain no benefit. Hexham TV a web based news organisation showed how Councillor Wearmouths team used bailiffs to force payments from businesses into the BID scheme and how Council officers were used to harass those who did not want to be part of it.

He then went on to fail to deliver Business Improvement Schemes in his home town of Morpeth and in the Town of Blyth.

As lay observers we are extremely concerned that this scheme supposedly designed to help Blyth is another designed to fail project that will actually deliver very little apart from the opportunity for Northumberland Conservatives to run out publicity on the back of it.

Getting back to our title for this item relating to how this bid if received would ‘shortchange’ Blyth, we need to ask ourselves what would £25m in money that can only be used to deliver something physical, known as Capital expenditure deliver for Blyth?.

£25m is a third of the cost of building a new high school in Hexham.

Approximately half of what’s it’s already cost to modernise County Hall in Morpeth, possibles the Norths biggest white elephant project this decade.

It may deliver two thirds of the cost of a new Blyth relief road.

So you can see quite clearly that the spend made by the Conservatives in Blyth will not move any of its most deprived wards out of difficulty, will not raise the survival rate of people born in Cowpen, Croft and Kitty Brewster to the level of Cramlington North and will not stop school exclusions, lower the crime rate or get the disabled help to fight for their benefits, but it will mean ever more people using food banks, more deby for the poor, higher drug use and indiscriminate private landlords screwing not only the benefit system but depriving their tenants as well.

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