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.

Labours new formula will ‘Benefit us All’

Block Grant and Barnett Formula funding across the UK is not centred wholly on Scotland but Labours policies under a new Government will attempt to equalise public expenditure nationwide and not centre the largest spend in London.

UK Block Grant funding last year was highest in Northern Ireland even without the bribes thrown at the DUP to capture their Parliamentary votes, funding that will be scooped up by Austerity 2 if the Tories win an outright majority in the commons on Dec 12^th.

Last year total block grant spending by the UK Government was £772Bn the highest spending award per head went to Northern Ireland at circa £13,950 but surprisingly for those who attack the Barnett Formula particularly former UKIP supporters, London is the largest Block Grant user at a staggering spend rate of £12,847 per person and with a population somewhere in the region of 8.9M you can see why the Barnet formula is required for smaller places such as Scotland and Wales who receive much smaller public expenditure amounts balanced by the size of their population but are through the Block Grant for Scotland of £10,152 per person compared to an England outside London expenditure per person of only £8,529 per person able to spend 20% more per annum on services for their people.

The ‘Barnett Formula’ itself  is not rocket science, in a UK-Scotland scenario, England has 10 times the number of people than Scotland therefore with a UK spend of £1 the equalisation rate for Scotland would be 10p and for England -3p yep that’s a minus!

The current Labour Party policy team has looked at how, whether we end up with BREXIT or not, can public expenditure be equalised over the next decade and lift the whole of the UK out of its current austerity trap, a trap that even Greece who has suffered major tax evasion problems by its population has managed to dissolve through the input of help from the EU and that includes the Tories austere and miserable UK.

Labour has obviously looked to its Scottish roots and the ability for 20% higher expenditure for 5M people and asked how it can deliver for the remainder of the UK. Its answer is to renationalise those items that the Conservatives under Thatcher and various PM’s since privatised in England and benefit from the nations gift to the Tory investors. Scotland for example has nationalised water, a strong and separate NHS, its own energy grid and Scotrail who run 94% of all trains over the Border are a wholly owned subsidiary of the Scottish Government. It has denied access to carpet-bagging investors to its socially required infrastructure.

Its easy to see Labour’s new thinking and its easy to see how it is affordable and can be achieved to benefit the English, without damaging the benefits from being a union gives to the peripheral populations of the UK who need the taxes paid by the many to assist the few.

Berwick Abandoned by the Tories

During 2014 the handouts from Vladimir Putins friend Alexander Temerko to assist Berwicks Tory MP Anne-Marie Trevelyan were openly criticised in the UK press.

It was recorded that Anne-Marie Trevelyan had received a £50,000 gift from Mr Temerko an offshore energy magnate.

Northumberland Conservatives who’s top table is made up of mainly farmers and those who ply their trade rurally produced a new Local Plan for Northumberland  that has recently been scrutinised by the Government (more to be said on that debacle at a later date) have not supported Mr Temerko  since Anne Marie Trevelyan’s gift was discovered. Instead they have enshrined within their plan the wish to support on-shore wind, which of course pays cash to landowners and farmers.

The support among Conservative voters in Berwick has waned quite considerably since the Brexit antics of the Tories as Anne Marie Trevelyan by her own admission is a staunch leaver , her constituency is the largest rural one in England and it’s the UK’s farmers and rural areas who have most to lose through Johnsons poor deal with Europe.

The recent interviews on TV with Hilary Clinton regarding the Tories not releasing information on Russian interference in the Brexit election and now this sudden snap election and the fact that Anne Marie Trevelyan’s Tory Party will not tell the British public what’s going on with Putin does lead to further erosion of trust in the Tory Party and of course Anne Marie Trevelyan’s position in Berwick.

Notes: https://www.northumberlandgazette.co.uk/news/mp-responds-to-aps50000-election-donation-claims-400106

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QJ01KrjTvUY