Where’s the Blyth Relief Road?

When last in power, Labour in Northumberland went all out to build a new northern relief road for Morpeth to ease pollution problems for residents in Morpeth improving their health and to ease pressure from the A189 by splitting the traffic attempting to access the A1 from the towns and villages which make up South East Northumberland and the rural coalfield.

Following on from the success of the new highway, cash was set aside by the Labour administration to set about designing and settling a route to build a relief road for the Counties largest Town, Blyth, to bring similar benefits for residents and reduce pollution levels on both Cowpen and Laverock Hall Road.

After a consultation period a finalised route was planned out and following the May 2017 local Government elections the incoming Tory administration ran out story after story about what they were going to deliver for Blyth.

The route is in two parts, an incoming route from the A189 and a cross town route along the old mineral line from Cowpen to Newsham. The Tories have recently been questioned by Labour Councillors and have had to admit there’s no cash for matched funding to develop this highway.

Cowpen County Council candidate Margaret Richardson spoke with us to express her disdain, after visiting the site of the cross town road in Cowpen she said: “It is typical of how the Tories treat residents in the Town of Blyth”. “They have promised the earth since 2017 and only delivered the tarmacing of one piece of road in Cowpen over the last four years.”

“Their accounts are a shambles and they have spent over £100m on roads in rural areas yet can't produce enough cash to match the Highways Agency funding for this project and have sent it back to rot on their shelves but can find £8m to bail out their mates at ADVANCE Northumberland”.

“If elected on May 6th I will fight tooth and nail to get this highways project off the ground and begin to improve the health of Cowpens residents who have suffered an extra four years from the pollution problems brought about by the abandonment of this project and the Tories ungenuine back turning plan they have run out against Blyth for the last four years!”

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.