Regarding reported threat of closure – Advertiser 22/5/13
Open Letter from Councillors and MP on behalf of the three wards of Stretford regarding the reported threat of closure of Wilkos in Stretford Mall, Trafford, Manchester UK.
Speaking up for residents and the emerging community vibe. Addressed to the board of Wilkinsons.
Please join me and Love Your Bike in opposing new mega-trucks being allowed across Europe.
Love Your Bike are an organisation attached to Friends of the Earth and supporting a safer, greener, bike friendly city here in Manchester. I recommend their website.
They’ve highlighted the potentially horrific introduction of articulated 80ft mega trucks across europe if proposals go ahead are urging everyone to write to their MEPs to work with them to oppose this move.
Labour MEPs have already forcefully voiced their opposition to this introduction. I hope the MEPs of other parties will similarly respond but the clock is ticking.
I have today written to Arlene McCarthy and Brian Simpson Labour MEPs for the north west to thank them for their support.
Here is my email:
Dear Brian,
I’ve been contacted by the Love Your Bike organisation about the proposal to allow trucks up to 80ft long and supported by the European Commission.
I notice from the Love Your Bike website that you have already stated your strong opposition to this change. I am therefore writing to thank you for that opposition and urge you to continue fight for safer modes of transporting goods.
As Love Your Bike have indicated, while the UK Government says it will not allow mega trucks to come to the UK it will be lobbied by the road haulage industry which has an insatiable appetite for bigger heavier lorries. In fact the UK Government buckled to pressure from the road haulage industry in 2012 by allowing 7 ft longer lorries on our roads which are already congested and not designed for vehicles of these proportions.
Even the European Commission’s own research showed that mega trucks are more dangerous than existing HGVs
Because of the double articulation needed for manoeuvrability in urban areas there is a serious loss of stability at cruising speeds which increases risk of snaking, for example changing lanes.
So once again thank you for your opposition and I note that so far, only yourself and your colleague Labour MEP, Arlene McCarthy have indicated their opposition to Love Your Bike.
Thank you for your unequivocal responses. It is much appreciated.
Mike Cordingley
Facebook Group: Gorse Hill Labour Party (Trafford) – open to all
Image Src = “Transpoint truck in Jyväskylä, Finland” by Antti Leppänen, CC BY-SA 2.0
A young woman is 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 is the image of the Environment Agency that I want to subscribe to. A public agency working with others to make our environment healthy and safe.
Over recent months though, my view of the Environment Agency has been challenged. No longer do I have such 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.
Friends of the Earth (South Hams) have highlighted that 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.
So much distrust has been created by the Environmental Agency. They didn’t even take notes when they consulted with the public
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.
Image: The Environment Agency considered legitimate use
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 been loathed to grant funding to projects that it felt were the responsibility of the landlord. And somewhere along the way 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 targeting 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.
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.
