Concreting over the County

County Council Trading Away Democracy and Residents Right to Object?

As your well aware from our past scrawlings we laymen are from a variety of backgrounds and some of us still have solid ties with our past lives. Through these links we are able to bring politics from the other side and not simply from the party political viewpoint.

Well via our links with the construction industry and the midnight rantings on social media from a new MP we believe that as ordinary people in the street you need to know whats going on that could be entirely in the interest of investors and totally against your interest as County residents.

In the Trumpiest style, the Tories in Northumberland under yours and of course our own noses have been making secret decisions that have not been brought into the public domain, one of those decisions is to openly trade planning permissions through the pre-planning process.

Developers paying for pre planning advice is not illegal, its not even unlawful but it does destroy your right as a citizen to object too and have your voice fully heard on planning matters in your area and we believe its morally wrong to entice trade from a public service that is wholly based on trust.

The Council have made contact with developers and set up a  forum where land agents, builders and investors can discuss with planning officers how they get around difficulties in developing their land banks in Northumberland and once the dowry, or is it a ransom? is paid for pre-planning advice those difficulties will be managed away.

Northumberland is now a dream world for developers and we will see the Council collecting very valuable Council tax from properties in areas you never thought of over the next few years and we will also see the Tories concreting over even more land in their desire to profit from ‘little box’ construction near your home.

Tory Leader can’t dodge the bullets on the uncertain future for Ponteland and Heddon on the Wall

Watching the on air Council meeting beamed from Morpeth last Wednesday observers like ourselves may have asked why the Labour Party, the LibDems and the Tynedale Independents were so against the transfer of a planning obligation to the Labour controlled City of Newcastle Council for a small patch of land lying between Ponteland and Throckley that is a minor element of a major coal extraction within the bounds of the City.

Well for those in opposition at County Hall in Morpeth this isn’t an attempt to stop any decision being made by the City Council it is about the protection of the villages that surround the City and the future needs of both the region the Country and the Government. As a nation we still need coal, will do for the next decade whilst we build a renewable future and the extraction of English coal is the least costly in the terms of human safety and transport mileage. 

So why all the furore? The answer is manifold but today we the Laymen wish to put some scenarios to those who live near this planning proposal and show why the Leader of the Conservative Group on Northumberland County Council may have let down the Town and villages he represents.



This small patch of land is the exit route for the coal that may be extracted from this huge site and that exit route will not be through the City of Newcastle, who through being the regional hub of the North-East has huge traffic and pollution problems that could lead to ever more vehicles being routed around the City and not through it by costly environmental charges being placed on the Tyne crossings within the City Centre areas.
 That of course will mean any coal extracted from this site will be routed through Northumberland to its railhead or the Port of Blyth to be transported by sea.



You may ask why that’s a concern as similar scenarios have been happening since the second world war? It has and the County of Northumberland through being the largest planning authority in the region has controlled that traffic very well indeed but by ceding its planning obligations a change stuck on the back of an item on managing the County Climate Emergency the Tory led Northumberland County Council has allowed another authority to manage the exit of this coal onto the County highways, an exit that could be extremely difficult for people who commute from Ponteland who complain about the highway in that area on a regular basis.



But what about the future if this coal is extracted?

On becoming the Leader of Council in May 2017 Councillor Jackson had two planning applications in his ward stopped and had the Council withdraw its ‘Core Strategy’ planning document from inspection by Government. The two sites Clickerman and Dissington Garden Village were to pay for a new high school and leisure centre in Ponteland, Councillor Jacksons team have gone ahead with Labour’s planned new school and leisure centre without the income from those sites to contribute towards the considerable costs of such a venture, leaving the County Council to borrow capital finance to pay for it.



Borrowing capital finance puts pressure on the revenue budget of the County Council, revenue funding pays for the services you receive as a resident of an area, Councillor Jacksons Conservative Group have just agreed to cut revenue and services by £16m leaving the villages and towns affected by this possible coal extraction with rapidly worsening services.



Also, the extraction of coal from this site leaves the City of Newcastle with possibly the most sought after building land in the North of England right on the doorstep of Darras Hall in Councillor Jacksons Ward and leaves the city with the ability to develop a fantastic future in rateable value terms not only for this land but right up to Newcastle airport, which can be developed alongside this site leaving Northumberland in the embarrassing position of having to provide a green belt buffer as they have ceded this area over to the City in planning terms.



The replacement for the Councils core strategy is the  Conservatives new ‘Local Plan’ in which they reduced the housing numbers in Northumberland in order to protect Ponteland and Darras Hall’s exclusivity. So Northumberland gets to service any growth in this area, which we expect to be considerable, without the revenue stream to improve the services its currently cutting.



Running alongside this issue is the ‘climate emergency’ that is being actively pursued in the City of Newcastle through proposed direct action on vehicles will lead the Highways authorities to require the building of a new road that will connect the A1 north of Newcastle to the A69 trunk road as the western bypass is already at a stand still at peak times. Any development on this new site will mean that the future link road will sit in Northumberland and not in Newcastle leaving the villages Councillor Jackson is cutting services too vulnerable to traffic pollution at a much higher level than they currently suffer from.



Therefore in conclusion we the Laymen believe the opposition parties were right to challenge this decision as it’s the people in Northumberland’s future they were thinking of before being voted down by Tories and Bedlington Independents.

The ‘albatross medallion’ may have to hang from a different neck from 2020

With the Governments announcement that Unitary Councils can raise additional income to cover care costs by 2% which in our laymen’s terms means that Council Tax will rise in single tier areas such as Northumberland by 4% it shows that the Government haven’t yet grasped the problems faced by the County Unitary Councils who have embraced integrated care, that’s care which is designed to keep as many ill people as possible treated safely in their own homes thereby helping to reduce unplanned readmissions to hospital. Northumberland County Council and Northumbria Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust are leaders in that field.

The Government tell us that Northumbria Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust manage and provide hospital and community services in North Tyneside and In Northumberland deliver hospitals, community services and adult care services. Northumberland County Council are the driving force behind the County Clinical Commissioning Group which helps balance the full financial package with some considerable funds travelling to the NHS from Council Tax to cover this service.

This whole arrangement has been an unmitigated success in most years particularly when the full winter pressures payment has been eventually paid up by Government, it allows an area struggling with high levels of industrial disease from its mining and heavy industrial past to cope with ever more elderly and keep readmissions to a minimum, but things are changing.

The last Labour Council in County Hall invested heavily in health by borrowing cheaply and buying out PFI’s and designing loan schemes to help its NHS partner to maintain the 9000 jobs that are one of the two mainstays of Northumberland’s Gross Domestic Product the Council being the other.

Using Council borrowed cash the NHS Trust was able to expand its Cramlington site an almost doubling in size that is lying quiet and still for that want of cash to pay the staff.

The idea of this expansion was timed when the Council and the Trust could rely on disability living allowance payments to the disabled who unlike the vision described in the Tory media do not live a lavish lifestyle and pay for much of their own care using their benefits as care funds, much of which is recycled back into the NHS. Ian Duncan Smith’s change to Personal Independence Payments and the requirement to appeal  before its paid, leaving many without funds for months to pay for care, destroyed what was a moderately sound ‘money tree’ to support the NHS in the County.

The new changes to attack the poor and make them poorer by attacking carers and pressurising families to find cash to support their disabled relatives has caused another shortfall with the golden apples from the money tree rotting off.

The Council in its anguish to ensure success for its NHS Partner has agreed a £16M cut in revenue services to the public over three years, which effectively will lead to major cuts in staffing levels and massive reductions in service delivery outside of adult care and expose the weaknesses in integration to the wider public.

£16M plus 2% a year is not enough to save the NHS having to reverse its cash flow and begin to pay for what most NHS Trusts see as the Councils responsibility.

Without a massive house building program County wide particularly in the popular Countryside areas in order to ensure high rateable values harvest a prime return bringing in more residents to aid the ailing County Council, both the Council and its NHS partner will suffer badly. It’s a pity that Northumberland’s Tory ‘act before you think Councillors’ stopped the Dissington Garden Village scheme in its tracks in 2017, 2500 valuable and popular homes in what would have been a high rateable value area may have halted the dwindling of essential NHS & Care Services in Northumberland

Northumberland County Council requires a new Auditor

 ‘Another fine mess Northumberland Conservatives have got you into’

Top national auditor walks away in disgust.

‘& these are minutes edited by the Council’

Click below and read on!

http://committeedocs.northumberland.gov.uk/MeetingDocs/45723_M9501.pdf

http://committeedocs.northumberland.gov.uk/MeetingDocs/45534_M9673.pdf
  

Your bank needs to rescue democracy to ensure their own safety in future.

The expected democratic changes to the way voters are identified in the UK will be introduced during this Parliament.

People will not be able to vote unless they hold picture ID and protection of anyone who uses the postal voting system will only be in place for the next three years and re-registration will be an ongoing tri annual event.

These changes, among many others are designed to ensure millions of voters get cut off from their democratic right to vote in case they do not support the views of the current administration.

Across Europe picture ID cards are issued by Governments to their residents except in Ireland, Demark and the UK. In those euro countries not named, the ID card is used as a form of identity during election periods. This is now to be the method of ID introduced by the UK Government complete with a punitive charge in order that the poor and the younger voter are written off from involvement in UK democracy.

Older voters don’t need to worry too much as Councils provide free bus passes which of course carry picture ID that is welcomed as identification at post offices and official places.

But if the Government wishes to expose democracy as a wicked costly thing and charge people to hold an ID card then why do we the UK residents not ask the organisations who still hold in their safes and lockers over £35 Billion of our cash, given freely to bail out their debts in 2008 when they were caught out gambling on the US free market economy, to pay for our ID cards.

Initial bailout payments of £136.6Bn were given rising to just under £500Bn when the full gambling debt was revealed. Some banks have paid back much of the debt but even with the Governments sell off of the nations 7.7% stake in RBS in 2018 there’s a £27Bn shortfall and with interest accrued on that national debt it leaves us all with a missing £35Bn. There are some 55M people eligible to vote in the UK and since the Tories got into power almost a decade ago on the back of the banking crisis, everyone has to have a bank account. Pensions and Benefits can only be paid through an account, therefore with the banks holding £636 of profit belonging to each and every voter in the UK should they not pay the Tory ransom to protect democracy and ensure they as well as everyone else can benefit in future from a fair and just, open society?

Why not write to your MP and ask? After all they were democratically elected on a non-ID card register.

https://www.theyworkforyou.com/mp/

Northumberland Tory who’s wasting more cash following Auditors criticism.

In an attempt to convince the population of the County that things are getting done, the Deputy Leader of the Tory led Local Government Association and portfolio holder for delivering super-services across parts of the old Castle Morpeth district and Cramlington North to the detriment of all other areas, Glen Sanderson, has decided to waste even more of the Councils hard earned (from the public purse) cash on decorating his sections vehicles ‘blue’, which is seen by many to be a definite politically motivated move during a general election period, known as Purdah which requires to be investigated by the Councils monitoring officer, if it still has one?.

For many years all Council vehicles were coloured yellow. In the first year of Tory austerity the vehicle manufacturers decided to recover some of the cash from reduced sales to Councils by charging extortionately high levels of recompense for yellow paintwork to cover off their losses. The 2009 administration of the County Council decided to simply order white vehicles which did not attract a colour premium. This cash saving methodology was carried on by the last Labour administration which made one slight change by accepting vehicles of any colour into their fleet to extend cash saving further on the public’s behalf.

Recently Northumberland County Council has been seriously criticised by its external auditor for wasting the public’s hard earned cash. The Tories didn’t see eye to eye with his beliefs so the auditor withdrew his team from the authority.

The new vehicle livery designed to improve the Tories feelings in time for the General Election, is an attempt to wallpaper over the cracks appearing in the Tory and Bedlington Independent ranks with only just over a year left before the next elections.

The outlay of the Tories self-pleasurable propaganda is costing an average of £600 per vehicle and as you travel around Northumberland you will see the new livery everywhere and if you happen to stray into the former Castle Morpeth townships of Ponteland, Morpeth Town and the Council deputy leader Councillor Wayne Daley's ward of Cramlington North where you will see these new vehicles in their droves you will get an image in your mind of how much this new form of Tory brain washing is personally costing you the Council Taxpayer and to be honest would much better spent on a new high street for Bedlington or the revival of Blyth Town Centre.

Notes:

  http://committeedocs.northumberland.gov.uk/MeetingDocs/45534_M9673.pdf

http://lga.moderngov.co.uk/mgUserInfo.aspx?UID=1085

We are facing the same problems as 2017 only much, much worse

In the North East, Northumberland people know what it’s like living under a Tory ‘regime’

After the last two years of worsening services, increased poverty and the non-deliverance of promises, voters in Northumberland are now learning at first hand the problems living under a unitary Council run by Tories who don’t give a damn.

The Council is in a toxic position of being accused of bullying on a number of occasions and although they often deny their guilt they have wasted public money and paid a number of six figure sums out to their victims.

Under their regime, an administration who rely on the votes of some independents they have told will get a new Town Centre if they toe the line to get their demonic policies through, the Tories in the County have managed to deliver nothing but hollow promises on a physical basis but have fallen at the feet of their masters at Westminster on policy when it comes to attacking almost 60% of their population through the application of severe austerity measures across the South Eastern corner and the former rural coalfield areas of this massive County.

People are more often than not fully committed to trying to resolve their own family problems than notice whats happening to them through local political means but we, the laymen have witnessed a massive growth in child poverty over the last two years, the downslide of many of the Council wards in the South East of the County into greater levels of deprivation, a huge rise in the level and use of foodbanks, ever more disabled people being denied access to personal independence payments and people are no longer shocked when we hear of teachers having to bring in food for their pupils.

The Tory answer of course is ‘more people are in work’, that may be correct but to comply with what we would rely on as being true people need to get value from their employment and that employment should improve their standing and position in society, but it doesn’t. We have a County where insecure and seasonal work as well as zero hour contracts and low income environments have become endemic, where poverty is the norm and the Tory business chair of Council Richard Dodd wears a body cam when he speaks to people.

The Tory media keeps telling the public that Labour doesn’t know where it stands on number of items but I can tell the Tories who read this blog that people are very clear as to where the Tories in Northumberland stand and it isn’t in the same queue for help that most of the Counties population find themselves in.