Public Warning from Labour Councillor

 Leopards never change their spots.

As Laymen, we noted this week on her social media pages Labour Councillor Eileen Cartie who represents Wensleydale ward in Blyth has brought the issue of Car Parking charges to the fore.

Her motives are well meant, she has brought the savage imposition of the Conservatives answer to overspending on pet projects such as their massive cosmetic luxury and waste of cash on resurfacing underused roads in the Countryside, by dipping their hands to cover the cost of those projects deeply into the pockets of the motorist.

The Tories who run the County Council have pushed car parking charges as an easy way to manage budgets since 2008 when the interim unitary county council for Northumberland was formed as the history of the former District Councils under their control was to charge as much as they could get away with to cover off the incompetence of former Tory administrations.

Councillor PeterJackson the then Leader of the Conservative and Independent Group on the County Council proposed to back free parking if every motorist in the County paid the Council £45 per year. After much debate and negotiation at a political level, records show that the Labour Party backed a motion to make all car parking free to helps trade CountyWide. they were beaten in the vote but managed to push an amendment through to keep parking free in South East Northumberland where it had been free for decades, a number of south east based non-Labour Councillors broke their whips and up until 2013 things remained unchanged.

After doing their sums in 2013 the Labour Group ran a report through Council making all car parking free unless a Parish Council objected on parking management grounds and that why for four years Seahouses, Craster and a few other tourist hotspots retained charges while the rest of the County was free. This was an enormous help for shoppers and increased the tourist pound spend in the County massively.

When the Tories won the 2017 election the charges began to creep back on. Led by the portfolio holder for Highways and Car Parking the current Leader of Council and farmer who stays on his land Glen Sanderson.

Councillor Sanderson who can probably afford to pay for any hike in charges is at it again on car parking and has run out his vision for extra charges from May this year.

 

Councillor Cartie is right to warn people about this huge issue as the Beach car parks in Blyth are in the Ward she represents with the Ranch car park close by. Labour are committed to retaining free parking Countywide. 

 

How Safe will Law change to help Covid patients vote in local elections be?

          (Postal Voting is the only safe way 

to protect Democracy!)

 

The Government is about to alter proxy voting laws for May's local elections to allow people suffering from coronavirus to nominate a friend to vote for them up to 5pm on polling day. 

The date for registering a proxy voter will be cut from April 27 to 5pm on May 5, in the hope that those suffering from the virus will not feel they have to risk spreading it by going to polling stations. 

The change applies to local elections in England and Wales, and has been supported by the Electoral Commission, which will work with the police to ensure the move does not increase the risk of fraud.

Critics point towards how difficult it is for Election Officers to guarantee the signatures of voters who will be allowed to vote late and are ill as peoples signatures vary depending on circumstance and proxy voting as late as 5pm on a polling day will exacerbate the problems of ensuring the May elections are both covid free and democratically safe as unlike the use of postal voting checks will be difficult to fully verify.

Support for a major Government backed take up of postal voting and a reframed message via TV advertising over the next few weeks would gift Councils, Police, the Public and the Electoral Commission the comfort that authenticity can be correctly clarified ensuring a safety net of knowledge that these elections will be both covid free and democratically safe.

 

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/934119/Postal-vote-application-form.pdf

 

Council Chief Executive s unlawful suspenion

Northumberland Tories caught acting unlawfully and bullying staff.

https://www.chroniclelive.co.uk/news/north-east-news/northumberland-county-council-suspension-report-19665886

 

Members of Northumberland Conservatives have been exposed in a report to a Council Committee by Chronicle Live for acting unlawfully and bullying members of the staff working at the County Council by trying to interfere with due process.

 

Councillors from any administration in power have a duty of care to ensure they safeguard the workplace and the staff who work in it for them.

 

‘Complainant Members’ have not been named in a report to Council therefore all 32 Conservative Councillors who make up the Conservative Group and  control Northumberland County Council are guilty until they name and deselect any who have attempted to cloud the investigations into their Group members misdemeanours.

 

Those to blame are listed below and should all be treated as guilty for not revealing the truth and exposing those by name those who are responsible!

 

 

Conservative Group (CON)

32 councillors

• Armstrong, Eileen
• Bawn, David Lee
• Beynon, John Ace
• Castle, Gordon
• Cessford, Trevor
• Daley, Wayne
• Dodd, Richard Robert
• Dunbar, Christine Lesley
• Flux, Barry Malcolm
• Gibson, Rupert McLure
• Homer, Catherine R
• Horncastle, Colin William
• Hutchinson, James Ian
• Jackson, Peter Alan
• Jones, Veronica
• Lawrie, Roderick Malcolm Gordon
• Murray, Anthony Harkness
• Oliver, Nicholas
• Pattison, Wendy
• Quinn, Karen Rachel
• Renner-Thompson, Guy
• Riddle, John Robert
• Roughead, Gregah Alan
• Sanderson, Hugh Glen Howard
• Seymour, Catherine
• Stewart, Gordon
• Stow, Kenneth George
• Swinburn, Mark David
• Thorne, Trevor Norman
• Towns, David James
• Watson, Jeffrey George
• Wearmouth, Richard Watson

 

 

Labour to step over the threshold and help Northumberland families in need

 Criticism from Northumberland Conservatives about Labour's plans for an increase in Council Housing stock of 1500 homes over the next four years shows that they have no idea how much they have spent since May 2017 and on what?

During the run up to the 2017 local government election its well recorded that people actually believed the lies being spread by Northumberland Conservatives that Labour was going to increase public borrowing to £1.4Bn and spend £80m on a new county Hall in Ashington for vanity reasons.

Those ‘new conservative’ lies along with their spin regarding the money tree in 2010 have been proven by their own actions that borrowing both national and local has spun out of control under both a Conservative Government and a Conservative County Council in charge in Northumberland.

At the recent budget meetings led by Cllr Nick Oliver (yes that is the same Councillor who had to be told off by members of his own party in public last week for breaching Councillor etiquette and law on a planning matter) spoke about his group borrowing £800M of new capital cash so far and his need to borrow a similar amount to deliver their own vanity projects. A figure well in excess of that his group said Labour would borrow and yet look around where you live and ask yourself what have they done with all that cash. The only big cash item they have spoken about in public is their spend of £100m on rural road resurfacing. Not a great help to those in need!

 

This week the Labour Leader Susan Dungworth and her Deputy Scott Dickinson have spoken about their manifesto promise regarding the need for a major increase in Housing Stock to help those in need across the County. The Tories hit back with the ‘money tree’ tosh immediately.

But we laymen believe the Labour Group is right to be determined to increase stock under their control as the experience of people who find themselves exposed to rogue landlords or having to extend the number of overcrowding incidents by young families having to camp in their parents homes due to the endemic low wage economy across the County. It is growing rapidly even though some retailers are about to reward staff with higher wages mortgages are now much harder to get, making a County-wide increase in housing stock essential to help those in greatest need become independent and feel safe with the Council as their landlord.

Labour Group’s big ambitions could not have come at a better time for the private rental sector. Its vibrancy has completely fallen away and rent recover is reported as being down in the low 60%’s during 2020 and 2021 hasn’t begun much better with many small landlords sitting on former Local Authority stock across the County looking to shed their responsibilities and cut their losses. They could find themselves with a cash ready buyer in a Labour Council after May 2021 if they market the stock at the right price and even though the Councils current housing stock sits mainly in the former Alnwick and Blyth Valley areas bought in homes in former Wansbeck and Castle Morpeth and up the Tyne Valley in areas such as Prudhoe and Bywell would be simple to manage were told, as maintenance craftsmen and housing officers already work and travel between their traditional sites.

During the last Labour administration at County Hall 2013-2017  Labour built just over 300 brand new homes to a very high standard indeed costing just over £32M and that included four of the sites being opened up from scratch. They used contractors to develop those sites but are aiming to begin training the construction workforce for the future and ambitiously hope to build using direct labour who can develop sites very reasonably indeed.

With the final link in their ideas being put in place by Government very shortly as the inspection and hopefully acceptance of the local plan giving at least a decade long supply of housing land to work on, much of it already in Council hands, Labour would not need to borrow much more than has been spent by the Tories on rural roads to get very close to delivering their much needed plans.

Information for resident's from your County Councillor Dierdre Cambell

 Spotlight on Newsham

Comments from Labours Newsham County Councillor Candidate Deirdre Campbell.
Council forces up Council Tax by almost 20% in three years, are now consulting to slash services to you.

Northumberland County Council is in the middle of an online consultation hidden from public view over the xmas period, to slash services and are offering residents of Newsham a continuation of delivering nothing for you.

May 2017 saw the Tories seize power from Labour at County Hall on the back of a National surge in right-wing politics and Labour’s dithering stand on BREXIT.

Well we can all see and feel how we have been let down by the Tories on that matter and in the meantime see how they have offered project after project to the residents of Newsham out into the press on this and that they were supposedly going to deliver for Blyth such as a relief road to ease the pressure off Laverock Hall Road. That relief road is essential as Laverock Hall Road has become an air pollution black spot. The filth from vehicles standing idling rises into the air during it most jammed times, both in the morning and late afternoon and its heavier than air particles settle on Newsham during the day and early evening exacerbating the health of our residents.

The Tories also promised on so many occasions that they will deliver the reopening of the AB&T line, rolling out ministers who had no intention of funding such a project until it was cleared by Transport for the North and with their Government now accepting the collapse of rail franchising at an alarming rate who are they going to get to run this line when spin, spin, spin is all they know?.

 

Northumberland and North Tyneside can help improve local fishing communities lot, even though Government abandoned them.

 Two minute read from Councillor Liz Simpson, Labour Councillor for Newbiggin Central and East.

One of the few things the extremely poor handling of the pandemic has done to improve my lot was to remind me that I needed to take some exercise daily.

Most days my husband and I wander along the prom at Newbiggin by the Sea and I look at the improvements to the beach behind the breakwater planned and delivered by a Labour Council. It reminds me to look around and see what has been delivered by the current Tory controlled unitary Council based in Morpeth, and I keep coming back to Paul Daniels and his catchphrase of ‘not a lot’.

The Newbiggin bay improvements were designed to save the town from rising sea levels and would be cost prohibitive on a larger scale, but looking around further I have noticed that the rocks at Church Point and the Quarry are worn smooth now by the tides and are beginning to wear faster. So how can we improve fishing for both anglers who bring tourist pounds, protect our shores and homes whilst helping traditional communities who rely on an industry lied too in the Brexit deal improve their lot.

The Euorpeans always expected that they would retain fishing within UK territorial waters and armed with a confident assumption that Britain would sell out the industry, reduced fish catches in the Medditeranean by 20% in 2019 and plan a further 15% reduction this year to help stocks recover, while investing heavily in inshore fishing reefs and commercial breeding programs to replenish depleted stocks much more easily in future while they can still raid UK waters to cover any shortfalls. So with a Government who appears to have abandoned an industry to simply raise its own profile, what can we do to help our traditional communities survive?

History and the Welsh,Scottish and Yorkshire embryonic but growing rapidly, coastal rewilding programs can give us pointers on some simple things that smaller levels of Government support and investment from established sources such as the Coastal Communities fund can achieve.

In Scotland, Wales and Yorkshire, the Government is investing in expanding commercial Oyster production activity and reseeding oyster beds to protect the coastline. Oysters and the reefs they develop protect our shores from erosion and filter our coastal waters free from algae developing a more oxygen rich environment within our inshore environments, allowing other marine animals and shellfish species to survive the batterings from rising sea levels, increasing quality fish stocks into the bargain.

In the past, history shows that huge oyster beds and their ecosystems protected our shores from Tynemouth to the Firth of Forth and now that better and more effective sewage treatment by Northumbria Water is online, they can again.

The benefits for Northumberland and North Tyneside if rewilding projects got underway would offset the cost particularly in areas reliant on tourism as sea angling is still a huge draw for the Tourist Pound.

As the County Councillor for a traditional fishing community I would really like to see any rewilding program start here in Newbiggin by the Sea and will push for it over the next four years. It would be nice to be able to watch as other shellfish began to revive and save the rocky shoreline around my Town. But wherever a program begins we would all benefit in some way and the spin off is that once oyster ecosystems become established they spread to surrounding areas.

 

Where does Blyth Valley End?

Local MP doesn’t know.

There have been calls for Ian Levy MP Tory MP for Blyth Valley to make a public open apology when he had the gall to announce a new factory planned in the Wansbeck Constituency stating it was a great achievement for Blyth.

The local Labour Party County Councillors, Blyth Croft Ward’s Kath Nisbet and East Sleekburn’s Jeff Gobin are both incensed that the MP for Blyth appeared to have no idea where his constituency ended and that any announcement should have been made by or on behalf of Ian Lavery the MP for Wansbeck.

Jeff Gobin told us, “It appears that Blyth Valley residents have chosen a media pirate who has stolen the kudos from our man for Wansbeck, Ian Lavery MP, to announce a project on the former Power Station site in Cambois that we the local Labour Party had our former  national leader visit five years ago when this battery plant was first revealed as a prospective factory tenant by ARCH the northumberland development company.” “Its shocking that this MP from ower the water has had the gall to break with all expected protocol in announcing an improvement scheme that creates jobs in another constituency and he needs to apologise for his very rude actions.”

Croft Wards Kath Nisbet said “This man the Tory Ian Levy must have read the LibDem handbook as they always claim that they have been involved with anything good whether they have or not”. “I think its great that Wansbeck Constituency is getting a factory to bring employment for 8000 people but when a man voted in as an MP doesn’t know where his constituency ends and he needs to ensure he apologises to Ian Lavery at least if not the whole of the area for his what is possibly deliberate to steal the press faux pas.”