We’re due to debate a motion at Council tonight on HS2. Both Conservatives and Labour have submitted motions in support. We’ll probably remit the Labour motion that I drafted to avoid duplication. I was interested in the Westminster Hall debate that took place this very morning. I think the arguments in favour of HS2 are irrefutable.
I’m hosting the video of the debate below.
Back from my holiday. I’ve tried to keep up with events whilst away. The Derwent Appeal against their application for judicial review has been rejected. As far as I’m aware, that is the end of the line in their attempts to prevent the approval of Tesco’s plans. The store is too big but we’re all agreed upon that, even the planning committee. And if it’s going to go-ahead, I’d rather it progressed quickly to allow the cricket club to get going. The worst case scenario has always been that the fiasco of the way the planning meeting was conducted was sufficient to fatally delay the implementation but not sufficient for the decision to be reversed. Nobody should feel happy with the way the Tories have conducted this. Their behaviour has ranged from being a soft touch to that of blinkered complacency.
Assuming, that this appeal is the end of the matter, the focus now turns to Stretford High School’s ambition to provide much needed improved sports facilities. Over the last few weeks the school has been working really hard to work with the community and park users to come up with a design that preserves the park area as a park but gives community access to excellent facilities; and protects the the community from being priced out of those facilities. The school has steadfastly refused to be drawn into the controversy over the Tesco and has maintained throughout that the school’s plans are completely separate. Whilst we on the Labour side always felt that there was potential to explore an enhanced Stretford Sports Centre or use of the land earmarked for the enlarged Tesco, the school to be fair, has always maintained its preference for the facilities to be in the park.
Again to be fair, the meetings with the community have been conducted positively and significant progress has been made. There’s still plenty of work to be done but it’s not out of the question that the school can reach an accommodation. I’m therefore shocked that the Tories have submitted a motion to this coming Council Meeting that seems designed to polarise the whole process. The consultation is not over, plans haven’t been submitted or even drawn up; and the school is doing its utmost to take the politics out the whole issue. Yet Trafford’s Tories are saying, firstly ‘Yes it is part of the Tesco scheme’, then they congratulate the school in the middle of a consultation. Personally, I think it’s very risky making a political football out of the school and I can’t help being reminded of the way Thatcher used to provoke disputes through inflammatory remarks when there was danger of agreement. Thatcher was deliberate, this is is just crass.
No doubt we’ll have a ritualised bun-fight at Council but it would have been better for the Tories to have kept their peace over this issue.
Attended Lostock College car boot and fun day. Well attended and testament to the efforts to preserve this much loved school.
Attended Lostock Tenants and Residents meeting. Really pleased with the much reduced levels of anti social behaviour being experienced. Constructive proposal from Trafford Housing Trust to facilitate redesign of play area with planting and design delivered by the community young and old.
Highlight of the week had to be the presentation of the Freedom of Trafford to the 207 Field Hospital (volunteer) which took place at Sale Waterside on Thursday 23rd June. The Field Hospital is based at the Barracks on Kings Road, Old Trafford so it’s a very appropriate award. Trafford doesn’t grant the freedom of the borough lightly. This is the first time in living memory that we’ve done it. I’m proud that we don’t give away such honours to talent show hopefuls or even footballers. We’re right to reserve these awards for the very best and most deserving.
That this is a special award to a special unit can not be argued. The field hospital is primarily a volunteer unit and manned by health professionals from all over Greater Manchester. It has recently been deployed to Camp Bastion in Afghanistan. The hospital that the 207 ran there was the busiest trauma unit in the world. The contribution that the hospital made to saving so many lives of servicemen and civilians is just awe inspiring.
Colonel Kerry Trow received the freedom from the Mayor, Jane Baugh and gave a presentation about the unit’s work. It was a privilege to be there to witness the event.
Over to Salford to interview aspiring candidates hoping to be selected to stand. Salford had a fantastic crop of new people. We passed every single one of them to be allowed to go forward
Council Employee Disciplinary Hearing. One of those tasks that the public doesn’t see.
Council meeting – to confer the award of the freedom of Trafford (see above)
Lostock College Governors Meeting – A good meeting, the school continues to make good progress. Good Luck to all those taking exams. A lot of good feedback.
Put together leaflet on Stretford High / Gorse Hill Park for printing and delivery over the weekend
Freedom of Trafford appreciation- see above
Trafford Labour Local Government Committee – We got a little bit bogged down at this meeting and perhaps less progress was made than we might have hoped. It happens and thankfully is not typical. A pint in the pub afterwards was the highlight of the evening.
all day meeting of Transport for Greater Manchester Committee which included the AGM. I’ve been appointed to Capital and Projects committee, Metrolink and Rail committee and Trafford Ring and Ride steering group. The big issue is going to be High Speed 2, I’m very much in support of getting a high speed rail connection between Manchester and London. We need to shout much louder in support of this.
I’m going to be denied access to the computer over the next fortnight so updates might be more scarce in that time.
Foundation trusts bid to acquire Trafford Healthcare
Two neighbouring NHS foundation hospitals have bid to acquire Trafford Healthcare NHS Trust, which announced last December that it was seeking to become part of a larger organisation.
The Trust took the decision because, although it is performing extremely well clinically and has made £19m savings in the last three years, it is too small to remain financially viable as an independent entity.
On 4 April 2011, it formally launched its search for a partner by inviting neighbouring NHS foundation trusts to bid to acquire it. The deadline for submission of bids was last Friday (24 June) and the Trust today confirmed that it had received applications from two of its larger NHS neighbours.
Chief Executive Ron Calvert said: “We are pleased to have received these bids. The whole reason we are seeking acquisition is so that Trafford patients can continue to access high-quality, appropriate health services close to home.
“Our small size means our income will not cover our costs in future years and the gap is too large to close with efficiency savings alone. Joining a larger organisation will get rid of the costs associated with being a trust in our own right, and enable further economies of scale, saving money that can instead be spent on patient care.â€
The two bids will now be evaluated against criteria drawn up by the Trust and four panels known as reference groups involving patients and the public, GPs, the council, hospital staff and other key stakeholders.
The bidders will be invited to present their proposals to these reference groups and to the Trust Board. The Board expects to choose its preferred bidder by the end of the summer and will base its decision on the recommendations of the reference groups, as well as technical evaluations and its own conclusions.
The decision will then go forward for review by NHS Greater Manchester and NHS North West to ensure the preferred bidder has their support for acquiring the Trust.
Ed Balls’ call for a cut in VAT was timely. The UK economy is flat-lining as was feared by Labour. George Osborne’s reliance on savage cuts to eradicate the deficit without a strategy for growth risks consigning the UK to the slow lane. Unless we can stimulate the economy, clearing the deficit will prove to be dream rather than reality. Retail spending is down and investment is down. As the public sector shrinks, we need the private sector to pick up. The danger of going so fast is that the private sector can’t respond and as demand falls we enter a spiral of stagnation.
The council workforce is shrinking and services are being reduced. We’ve seen concessionary fares for young people hit and we’re seeing support for pupils travelling longer distances pretty much scrapped. I saw the Messenger was carrying a poll on the proposals. People were generally in favour of the cuts to the support. There wasn’t many comments but I suspect the mood was encapsulated by the words “Why should I pay for….?”. I can well understand the sentiment but the move provides a small snapshot of the dangers of the austerity measures. The families previously entitled to this support are going find the money out of their family budget which will reduce their ability to spend on other things. The council taxpayer is not going to see any reduction in council tax anytime soon so it’s not as though their income will be increased to offset the reduction. Multiply the change a million times in different ways with different cuts and the economy is taking a huge hit. It may be a cut in public spending but the private sector takes the hit as well.
Fundamentally, there isn’t a successful precedent for the Government’s economic policy and the Govt will have to revise the plans at some point. The trouble is that the Govt is so welded to the idea that it’s all Labour’s fault that any plan B or plan C becomes an admission that Alistair Darling got it right. And he did! So they’re stubbornly resisting any change.
A cut in VAT will not be a panacea, but it will help. The analysis of the effects of Alistair Darling’s earlier cut showed it did make a marked difference. It didn’t make huge changes to individual spending decisions but it did put more money in household budgets. It worked; as did the car scrappage scheme. It’s vital the Tories listen and take heed. Yes there has to be cuts and Labour would have been cutting too, but there has to be stimulus. Cut too fast and the whole economy grinds down. Cut at the right time with a package of growth stimuli and you end up with the tax intake maintaining its level and the deficit becomes manageable.
Trafford has been portrayed as a place where the cuts can be made without hitting frontline services. Of course this is a complete fallacy and we are seeing significant reductions in service. Lostock is not going to see the completeion of the road resurfacing programme, schools are being hit and care for the vulnerable is taking a significant cut. We’ve seen the crisis in Southern Cross Nursing Homes; the fact is their business model didn’t anticipate local authorities like Trafford making such swingeing cuts. It was a flawed business model in the first place but Trafford is equally shortsighted in believing that its austerity will not hurt.
Met with the acting heads of Transformation and Resources at the Council. And it is becoming a familiar story of officers having departed. The focus of the directorate was naturally on the decanting of staff to Quay West which in effect will be the temporary town hall for the coming year. Whilst I believe that building schools would be a better target for capital spend, clearly the investment in the local economy is not without merit and it will be good to see Quay West really come alive.
The shifting of Trafford’s Libraries into an independent trust continues to proceed. I have significant concerns as to how this pan out but as yet I’m not getting much in the way of detail other than than the council is talking to Wigan and Salford councils who’ve already gone down this path.
In finance, the officers are continuing to look at how the Welfare Reform Programme is developing. At present, Housing Benefit is paid by local councils but it’s proposed that it will become part of the Universal Credit. However Council Tax Benefit does not seem to following the same course. So how is this going to pan out?
Attended opening of Bridgewater Way footpath/cyclepath between Stretford Town Centre and Moss Road/Watersmeet. I love this improvement; apparently the use by cyclists along the stretch between Sale and Stretford has increased from 19,000 to 90,000. It’s a huge success. We need to be doing more of this sort of investment.
We three Gorse Hill Councillors along with our Longford and Stretford colleagues descended upon Stretford High School on Monday night as a consultation on new sports facilities got underway. This was not an easy meeting.
The ongoing saga of the giant Tesco casts a mega-shadow over any proposal. As part of the Tesco scheme, the school surrendered a playing field to the council that will ultimately (if it comes to pass) be sold to Tesco to enable it to build the larger store when it’s added to the land they already own. The receipts from the land sale will be handed to Lancashire Cricket.
So under that shadow, we met to hear a proposal to improve the sports facilities available to the school. In normal circumstances this would be pushing at an open door. Labour, more than any other party puts school investment, particularly in schools serving deprived communities at the core of our ethos. It is why we are here.
The expansion of facilities includes putting a floodlit all weather pitch on Gorse Hill park which would be fenced off together with the existing park football pitch. Access would be controlled to prevent vandalism, dog fouling and over-use of the grass pitch. Additionally, the school will be building indoor sports facilities incorporating changing rooms on its own land in front of the school.
To be fair, the school is envisaging wide community access to the facilities when not being used by the pupils and control would contracted to a third party.
The problem is the park. We do not like to see parkland lost. Although there’ll be no buildings actually built on what is Gorse Hill park, there will be controlled/restricted access to some of it. One might argue that we already restrict access to bowling greens in some of our parks. Victoria Park Bowling Green in Stretford is a prime example of fencing off and securing part of a public park. So isn’t this same?
In principle it probably is the same as fencing off a bowling green. However, the two pitches on Gorse Hill park will be significantly bigger than bowling greens. So one issue is therefore, the scale. The second and major issue is that until the school surrendered its field which is now intended to enable the bigger Tesco, the school had an opportunity to develop facilities on that field. Whilst Victoria Park Bowlers will not have had an alternative location other than Victoria Park, Stretford High School did have an another option.
(leaving aside that I am still critical that such a prime position in Victoria Park is secured like a prison compound – the bowling green should have been moved to a less prominent position if it was going to have such an intimidating fence)
Strikingly, Stretford High School did not receive anything for the surrender of the Tesco field, so this is not a case of the school only being able to invest in facilities through the sale an asset. The school felt the field was not an appropriate facility for the school. The school told us about safeguarding issues, getting the pupils across a busy road and the time lost from the lesson in terms of getting over there. There were other issues in respect of Ofsted specifications and the cost of using Stretford Sports Centre rather than the indoor facilities to be built.
Our position as local councillors was that too much of the negotiations had been done behind closed doors; that we’d not been consulted as to the surrender of the field to the council. We supported the school’s ambitions for better facilities, but we felt whilst we could understand the school’s preference for those facilities to be adjacent, rather than on the other side of the road and behind the sports centre, this was at the cost of enclosing a major portion of the park. The Tory Council’s desire to get the land into Tesco’s hands brought the council’s readiness to surrender the park into question. The appraisal of the suitability of the Tesco field for sports development and subsequent surrender of the land to Tesco would have benefited from greater scrutiny and transparency. It was now being presented as a fait accompli which quite frankly angered us. My colleague Dave Acton expressed this very well and powerfully.
As I understand the field has not yet been sold to Tesco, or at least neither the council nor the Cricket Club have received the £21m, I believe any consultation should include the suitablity of the Tesco field as a location for some of the facilities. Of course this would in effect bring the £21m LCCC money and Tescos itself into the consultation, but that is what consultation are for, to present all the factors and interdependencies into the open and give people a say.
If the Council has entered into contractual obligations to Tesco and LCCC that prevent this, then we should be told, as we need to be assured that the council has not made itself liable if the whole thing goes kaput through the legal challenges against the planning permission; or indeed this consultation.
If the community feels that the facilities envisaged for the park are a welcome addition, we will want assurances as to access and pricing. We will also want the partitioning of the park to be no more than absolutely necessary.
It is not unthinkable that there will be many who welcome the facilities. Certainly there’s much in the proposals that do have the community in mind. Amongst what’s envisaged is:
Ultimately, perhaps the most valuable pledge may be that the school and council will only view the development a success if the community are using it and in their words the place is buzzing. How we entrench this into the project will be one of the biggest challenges if the community approves.
Really we need to know your views. At this stage we’re in the pre-consultation consultation and the school, together with the council are consulting with councillors, community groups, churches and the local sports groups. Once this preliminary stage is over there’ll be a presentation at Stretford Sports Centre and local homes will receive a leaflet.
I’ve already been to two of these preliminary meetings and intend to go to more. And we’ll be communciating with residents ourselves.
It’s vital we take everyone’s views into account.