Tories hold back on road safety plans of dedicated Labour Community Councillor?

Taken Pre Covid

Councillor Kath Nisbet of Croft Ward in Blyth is disgusted at the slow progress the Tory led Northumberland County Council has made on a road safety project in the ward she represents.

Over a year ago Councillor Nisbet paid two thousand pound from her small schemes pot to have a safer entry into the Cowpen Quay area from Hodgsons Road via Durban Street designed and an estimate of costs prepared.

The estimate came out at £31,000 which she immediately agreed to fund, the works included the removal of a tree and the re-siting of a ‘home zone’ infrastructure island which is now past its best.

Councillor Nisbet explained to us at Northumbria News that “the creation of a home zone almost twenty years ago to slow dangerous fast traffic in the area of Cowpen Quay was an excellent modern idea at the time, but the community has now outgrown the project and as time has moved on better and far safer for everyone traffic calming methods have been designed and implemented.”

“A local shopkeeper has moved his premises across the Durban Street entrance on Hodgsons Road and admirably opened up a two car stopping place in front of his premises, but at peak times cars have begun to park right up to the tree and home zone island causing problems for drivers and pedestrians”

“The new design favoured by the County Council highways section as well as the community will benefit everyone and ease concerns for pedestrians who cross here to gain access to the bus stop on Hodgsons Road.”

“Its a disgrace that myself and my community have had to wait for over a year to have this project begun and those same Tories who have held up this job are making claims about me not spending my small scheme cash to benefit my Community, if this job had been in Morpeth or Ponteland it would have been done before the estimate came back”.

“It shows that Blyth has had nothing delivered in the last four years by these Tories who are hell bent on expanding deprivation and developing a two tier society in towns like ours”

Empire School of Boxing Blyth Statement of Thanks to two local councillors

 

Dissatisfaction with Government narrowing the gap as Council Voting draws ever closer.

 

This week, as the hype surrounding vaccination dies down and TV news gets drawn back into a much more varied set of reports which after a full year of concentration on the single subject of the pandemic is refreshing indeed, we notice that the latest polling data is beginning to move back towards its expected long term position of a two party 50/50 split as May 6th Local Government elections loom ever closer.

Boris Johnson’s attempt to stall the decline in his Party's popularity by having his inoculation against the virus live on TV failed to gel with voters and the nine ball position of frozen pay for millions of essential  workers in the public sector and a miserly 1% for NHS staffs, the recorded loss of £38Bn as the Tories disposal of RBS stock out of public hands back into the clutches of their banking cronies continues and the Government supporting the huge rises placed on Council tax payers as local authorities struggle to manage the costs poured onto their services and the demands by the Tory Government to slash budgets past the level of no return, has led to a fall back of those supporting the Tories of 2.5% in a week.

After the close of play on the weekend polls we notice the right wing press revisiting Lord True’s report on slashing benefits, including the Triple Lock on state pensions, heating allowances, OAP Bus Passes and free prescriptions for the elderly in order to pacify their readers and however popular these cuts would be with small minded middle class voters they will not bode well for the polls over the next few weeks as Labour leans towards showing how well they will protect the older voters and Keir Starmer correctly linking business growth after 12th April with older persons spending power.

Locally across the North East, Labour Leaders and the North of Tyne Mayor have shown how well they can work together with the release of the North East transport plan which includes the finance to take the reopening of the AB&T Northumberland Line onto the next phase and begin planning the regions future growth even though the Tyne, Wear and Blyth freeport and jobs growth plan was snubbed by the Tories, leaving little hope for areas suffering endemic deprivation and poverty until the NE transport plan begins a further roll out beyond the AB&T Northumberland line such as the dualling of the A1 to the border with Scotland.

Conservatives in Crisis pleading for help from above!

With Tory support melting away in Northumberland as voters, even hardened Conservatives have begun to tell candidates what they think of their only actions over the last four years with ‘mateism’ sitting front and centre in the Cabinet Office at county hall and the complete and utter lack of action in delivering projects in the townships across the County has become running open wound in their crucified sides.

Our friends in Westminster have broken a story that we expect will be sensationalised and spun out by the top DJ for Northumberland Conservatives, the beleaguered and reputationally damaged Councillor Richard Wearmouth, the stranded chairperson of the bust Tory company ADVANCE Northumberland, which has become a major drain on the coffers of public money being held in reserve to benefit those in greatest need right across the County. 

His Cabinet at County Hall decided to strip out £8M to bail his mess out at ADVANCE Northumberland from Covid finance and when challenged by Labour and Independent Councillors on the matter decided that they would strip it out of Adult Care reserves instead, leaving the most vulnerable in society underfunded in order to pay debt on a company set up and mismanaged by the Tories and its Chairperson over the last three years.

We have been informed that councillor Wearmouth and his cronies have been pestering Ministers and Secretaries of State to help them out of the hole in the ground they have created for themselves by pleading on their bended knees to receive any utterance Government can muster regarding finance for the proposed ‘British Volt’ battery factory that may be built in the river Blyth basin.

Its expected that a pledge of finance will be given to the project, a project that only eight weeks ago the Prime Minister thought was to be built in Anglesey and had to be corrected by his staff that he and his cronies had already steered the plant to the north-east from the two sites earmarked for its construction in Wales to try and protect their red wall wins as the Tory vote was already slipping away in the principality.

Its believed by our contacts that £200M will be pledged and that Councillor Wearmouth will spin this out as a massive election booster for his dispirited and caught out ‘nasty party’ team at County Hall in Morpeth.

Whist reading this and hearing his spin later this week you may be asking how we know this is only a story from the Conservatives and not the real truth?

Well in order to handle Government cash of this magnitude a Council has to press the project and its supporters and they have to undergo a series of tests known as due diligence as you the taxpayer will be held responsible if anything goes wrong.

With the current record of ADVANCE Northumberland and Labours pledge in their manifesto to scrap the company and bring it back in-house, there's plenty to go wrong, the Council officers whose job it is to protect the public purse have engaged an expert in due diligence to carry out the process and as due diligence is what it sounds like, diligent, the results of that work will not be known and reported on to cabinet and Council until after the elections on May 6th.

Confused of Cowpen

Spinning Stories just like his mates!

I find it quite amazing that the Tories across Blyth have decided to expose the frailties of a system their members redesigned in 2017 to ensure capital projects put forward by Independent and Labour County Councillors get put on the back burner while projects the ruling Tory Group want completed get rushed through.

In criticizing the outgoing Cowpen County Councillor, Susan Davey and accusing her of not spending £55K in her ward shows that on the second policy change made by his mates that of not recording projects until they get underway he is also miles out of kilter.

I contacted Susan who informed me that she has waited to add to her pot to build a new classroom at the Empire School of Boxing, an organisation who has over 250 Blyth children from some of the Country’s most deprived wards through its doors each week when covid hasn’t been stopping play.

Susan said: “Its pathetic that a Tory candidate is acting in such a childish manner when his Group runs the Council and he must not have noticed in his obviously confused state that his Tory cabinet member for Finance still hasn’t spent £55K in his ward and the former Leader of Council Peter Jackson has £31K unnallocated”

“The building work at the Boxing School will go ahead as soon as it gets through the planning process”

New Hartley Building Site

Planning refused by Labour, brought in by Tories

through their ‘Concreting over the County Policy’

Following a very successful campaign organised by the Seaton Valley Labour Party in partnership with local people during 2015 & 2016, the planning application 15/01182/FUL for 285 houses on a greenfield site adjoining the village of New Hartley was refused in February 2016.

This refusal, much to the delight of the villagers who had worked tirelessly with their County Councillor and current Leader of Northumberland Labour Group, Councillor Susan Dungworth to put forward an argument in planning terms that it was an overdevelopment of a village which lacked infrastructure to support such huge growth was seen as an unmitigated success story that could be duplicated wherever huge developments were being promoted in unsuitable (in planning terms) locations.

The loss of the Council elections in May 2017 left the village exposed once again, now to a Tory County council and a developer who is a well known giant donor to the Conservative Party.

A new application was slipped through during 2019 on the back of the Tories unwritten but very prominent developers charter to concrete over the County and their removal from statute of the Councils ‘core strategy’ planning document and the dreadfully slow progress made to replace it with a much weaker Local Plan allowed the big boys to come and mop up sites wherever they and their Tory mates decided was profitable. 

Councilor Dungworth fought hard but the permission was granted and the village of New Hartley will suffer for decades to come from the effects of the Tories actions.

Yet we have a Tory candidate running around blaming the Labour County Councillors for allowing this development to happen. People need to look at the above application number on the Councils planning portal and reassure themselves that this Tory isn’t keen like most of his colleagues on telling the truth, or does he even know what the truth is?

‘CON’servatives make residents wait almost four car wrecking years to have their road resurfaced.

Residents of Malvins Road and its feeder streets have been forced by Northumberland Tories to wait four years to have their street resurfaced, one of the busiest roads in Blyth, while those same Tories spent £100M each year re-engineering and renewing roads to remote rural farms and hamlets.

Way back in 2016 an application was made to close Malvins Road for six months to bring services and drains to supply the new homes being developed on that street. Labour County Councillor Susan Davey lodged a formal objection on behalf of residents which was withdrawn with the agreement of residents when they were informed that the developer would contribute heavily to having the road resurfaced on completion of their services work. That contribution was later planned to be increased as the road was closed for over a year.

Labour’s candidate for the 2021 elections, Town Councillor and deputy Mayor of Blyth, Margaret Richardson who was brought up in the area said: “ I have been watching this closely since the Tories took over in 2017, they have sat on this job which was placed in the Local Transport Plan to be resurfaced for almost four years until they could boast that they are having the road repaired”.

“The Tories brought up their MP for Blyth valley for a photo shoot as this is the only job anyone can name that the Tories have bothered to do in Blyth since May 2017.”

“All of my friends and relatives in Cowpen cannot believe the gall of the Conservatives who in the light of top level investigations into their activities as a Council administration have shown their disdain by blowing this resurfacing job up as a success story”.