From the Canal to Sevenways

Category: Blog

  • The Myth-makers

    ….Or How I lost Confidence in the Enviroment Agency following Pickles’ Decision allowing Barton Incinerator

    BBC North West tonight screened an item on Blackpool’s seawater quality on Friday. A young woman was filmed dressed in wetsuit paddling in the waves under grey skies on a miserable drizzly day taking samples of seawater. She’s interviewed, she works for the Environment Agency and she admits she’s the only person paddling that day, but it’s just another day’s work to keep our environment safe and clean.

    This worthy image of the Environment Agency is one I’ve always previously subscribed to, and it’s easy to see how their marketing team could collar the Labour and Conservative MPs for Blackpool in the photograph above.

    Over recent months though, my view of the Environment Agency has completely changed. No longer have I confidence in the Agency’s moral purpose or its accountability; and most importantly I no longer have confidence in its guardianship of the environment.

    I’m sure there are many staff within EA working tirelessly and honourably. It certainly has one of the best marketing departments of any Govt Agency. But our experience suggests the agency has constructed a myth.

    On Thursday Eric Pickles announced his decision to give the go-ahead to the Barton Renewable Energy Plant following Peel Energy’s appeal to the planning inspectorate. The Inspectorate’s report to Mr Pickles is riddled with references to the Environment Agency as an authority. The inspector defers time and time again to the Environment Agency.

    So Pickles passes the buck to the Inspector and the Inspector passes the buck to the EA

    But as Friends of the Earth (South Hams) have pointed out, the Environment Agency has never refused an Environmental Permit to an incinerator application. And campaigners here have voiced  so many criticisms of their report on Barton that it casts doubt on the whole process.

    • The Breath Clean Air Group point out that the Environment Agency has allowed Tindall Street to be used by Peel to measure impact rather than the much nearer Wilfred Street.
    • It’s been well publicised the planned stack at Barton will be half the height of similar plants because of the nearby aerodrome.
    • We’ve had resident drop-ins with no notes taken of concerns.

    Eric Pickles proudly heralded a ground-breaking shift in power to councils and communities overturning decades of central government control. Instead we got a stitch-up and more distrust than ever.

  • Barton Biomass Incinerator Representation from Mike Cordingley to Secretary of State for DCLG

    Letter to Secretary of State DCLG re BioMass Incinerator in Davyhulme, Manchester UK

    Mike Cordingley

  • Talks on Garbage and Leaves

    I wasn’t at the meeting but I too can confirm it was on the agenda at residents’ request. I don’t think that is the point though – neighbourhood forums are exactly what it says on the tin. Too often the Tories have tried to dictate the debate. There has to be an expectation that Councillors who sit on the Council’s cabinet are willing to answer for their policies. Yet again it seems they’ve turned tail and run away. Not good enough.

  • Weekly Update 30/7/2012 – Tuesday’s Meetings – Confusion at the Community Panel

    Tuesday

    Meeting to discuss Gorse Hill priorities on the Councils ward profile

    Meeting of Urmston’s Community Panel of Trafford Housing Trust. These panels distributed £0.75m across the borough last year and so are probably the biggest and most accessible funders of local community projects.

    The Urmston panel covers as far as Partington to the West and stretches into Lostock at Selby Road in the East, so the area covered includes a major part of Gorse Hill Ward.

    There’s an intention to make the panels more focussed on achieving aims. Not before time. There’s always been a suspicion that there hasn’t been an approach that was as robust, disciplined and objective as might have been expected. Application papers have been given out on the day with no chance to assess the quality of the application.  As a councillor, and particularly one who was until last year a Board member of the Trust, I’ve opted out of the final fund granting. My focus has been on setting the parameters and priorities.

    I had one member of staff saying the grants were funded by the government,

    another saying the council was funding it,

    and a panel member saying it was a loan from the bank.

    I’ve never felt that the panels had sufficient regard for the needs and priorites of the neighbourhoods in which the Trust’s tenants live. It’s been a constant gripe of mine, to such an extent, I have probably bored my fellow panel members to distraction. In my defence, Urmston panel has historically shown itself as loathed to grant funding to projects that it felt were the Trust’s responsibility as landlord. And somewhere along the way, in this disdain, the officers and panel alike have lost sight of where the money comes from.  At Tuesday’s meeting I had one member of staff saying the grants were funded by the government, another saying the council was funding it, and a panel member saying it was a loan from the bank. So we have an unusual situation for any funding organisation whereby there’s no knowledge within it of from where the money comes.

    The simple answer to from where the money comes is that it comes from the Trust’s ‘income’ of which over 80% is rent or service charges. Given that most of the other sources of income are ringfenced, it seems remarkable that tenants are rarely acknowledged in this process, rarely acknowledged in terms of targetting the funding and rarely acknowledged in terms of celebrating the good things that are done with the money. I have come across in the past, the extremely arrogant assumption  that a high proportion of tenants had their rents paid via Housing Benefit so it wasn’t really they who were paying, it was the DWP. That view was reprehensible then, it is even more so now, given the cuts in Housing Benefit.

    they’ve written the tenant out of the script

    I was a board member when we took the difficult decision to increase rents to reach the Government’s Target rent by 2012. So rents have been increasing faster than inflation over the last few years. That should mean that the Trust is morally obliged to have regard to the tenant’s contribution to the Trust’s investment in new housing and the work it does in communities, including the community panel funding. Instead, it seems they’re written out of the script.  I wasn’t impressed.

    The day cannot come quick enough for there to be no panel that operates without a majority of tenants on its funding body and no Housing Trust officer connected to that body who cannot give an exact and consistent explanation of where the money comes from.

  • Weekly Update 30/7/2012 – Executive Meeting – chapter four (Council Tax Benefit)

    Council Tax Support

    The Government is abolishing Council Tax Benefit and delegating responsibility to Councils to support the poorest. Problem is that they’re not funding a replication of the existing scheme. Instead they’re making arbitrary cuts of 12%. They’re protecting pensioners but in some ways that makes it even more difficult to limit the effect on the rest. In effect the overall reduction on non pensioner recipients would be 20%. So whilst we continue to have a cap on the amount of council tax the very wealthiest homes have to pay, they’re pulling the safety net away from residents at the other end of the scale. Remember we have homes on the market at over £11m where the council tax is capped to be the same as homes valued at a fraction of that.

    Left as a simple 20% cut, it will affect 1238 households in Gorse Hill (almost one in four homes) but only 121 homes in Timperley. How is that fair? Even the ruling Conservatives seem embarassed by these changes. In mitigation they have tried to shape the changes to protect the most vulnerable and they’re attempting to levy council tax on empty properties earlier to generate income to go towards supporting their scheme. However until the Tories are prepared to levy a fair council tax on the wealthiest, as far as I am concerned they are cruel, nasty and cowardly. This is one of their most disgusting policies and we should never forget it.

    And as usual the Lib Dems say nowt.

  • Weekly Update 30/7/2012 – Executive Meeting – chapter three (Community Infrastructure Levy)

    Community Infrastruture Levy

    When major housing or retail developments are built, it often places a burden on Council’s to support the development with infrastructure. The classic example is extra classrooms in a school when a development increases the school age population.

    Currently developers have been expected to make a Section 106 contribution to the council which is a national scheme.  The Government is changing this and largely allowing Councils to come up with their own schemes. Some council’s, mindful of the need to encourage growth, have decided not to impose any levy. Trafford feels it should and I do tend to agree with them.

    I’m not hugely impressed with all aspects of the Government’s parameters they are setting for Councils. And whilst local schemes have merit, there is a cost due to the complexity of each individual scheme. The Govt ise being much more prescriptive in preventing the contributions developers make on each scheme to be pooled across the borough. The idaa of a central pot that the council can use to address priorities is gone. The contribution now has to be applied to the specific neighbourhood. So consultants have been brought to make sure the scheme is robust and to ensure it doesn’t deter developers.

    Whilst it may seem attractive to stop contributions going to the other side of the borough, when you consider that affordable housing projects are exempt from the scheme, and as you see below, the contributions levied in places like Hale and Bowden will be much higher per development, it’s inevitably going to see more money going there than here.

    Private market houses in:

    Cold market sub-area £20 (e.g. Old Trafford, Partington)
    Moderate market sub-area £40 (e.g Stretford, Urmston)
    Hot market sub-area £80 (e.g. Hale, Bowdon)

    The rates above are per square metre – so you can see that a large house in Hale will generate a considerable levy to stay in Hale. The argument is that Hale is a very much in demand place to build compared to Partington. Or as they put it – the market is hot rather than cold.  (perhaps they watch a lot of these home makeover shows on TV)

     

     

     

    The consultation will now go ahead.