Category: Council

Scrutinised: Highway Spend
A notable scrutiny meeting took place on the 12th March looking at some of the issues that most exercise residents:
- How highway interventions such as crossings, yellow lines etc. are prioritised
- Pothole repairs and pavement maintenance
- Leaf and Gully Clearance
- Preventing Accidents
It was the Scrutiny Committee’s attempt at clarity and transparency in the prioritisation of interventions on a limited budget. I think the scrutiny committee made some progress.

The video of the meeting is worth watching.

Link to Youtube Recording

Summary of Meeting

Matrix Prioritisation

There was considerable focus from the committee on why certain projects get to the top of the list and others are held back. The example pursued by the committee was ‘double yellow lines’, something that requires a traffic regulation order (TRO). The presentation included a couple of matrices (shown above), but the officers hadn’t submitted all of them and they promised to follow up by submitting the TRO matrix.

Even without the relevant matrix I think we can get a picture of how proposals are scored. But then it got slightly more complicated.
- Sometimes opportunities arose to attach the job to another funding stream (examples included Active Travel and the Sale West and Altrincham Network Infrastructure project (Swani)). This could work both ways, bringing forward some projects but holding back others where a cross benefit project might be ‘anticipated’.
- Finance – I’m hoping they score cost v benefit in all cases, but the nature of yearly budgeting means it is sometimes only possible to do smaller works
There followed a degree of interogation on whether other interventions could push a project up to the top of the list, a senior councillor’s intervention or a popular petition heard in council.

Overall on Traffic Matrices

Essentially, we’re arguing over crumbs. The allocated budgets are so small that it’s hard to see some worthwhile schemes ever happening. We ought to have transparency regardless of the budget. These decisions are far less complex than officers and lead councillors protest. I don’t have a problem that political imperative might play a part in decisions as long as we can see that it has been applied.

The public are seeing comparatively vast amounts put into active travel. Whilst that is an entirely separate budget, I think the public want to see objectivity and prudence applied to those schemes too.

I would like to see all the various matrices and projects published on the council’s website. We’re going to have seek solutions to this growing backlog of work and the more we can be upfront about it, the better.

Two thirds of our footpaths are functionally impaired

Footways v Highways

“Footways are obviously a big priority for us, but we have to first and foremost , go with the safety issue and where we can have the most impact on safety. So, the fast majority goes on the ABC network and not on the U class network.” – Chris Morris

Generally, this is fair. If it was just four-wheeled motor vehicles, I could argue that damaged urban roads reduce speed and improve safety, but the effect of a pothole on two-wheeled vehicles can have fatal repercussions.

Nevertheless, our footways are in an unacceptable condition. This is a critical element of our activity supporting infrastructure that’s unusable for a lot of people and it’s getting worse.

Pothole repairs

My colleague, Cllr Simon Thomas, raised the quality of pothole repairs. He said he was astounded that we were not sealing the potholes and argued that we should also cutting the hole square for a better fix.

Cllr Thomas on Potholes

I’m not sure I understand the response from officers in terms of the specific question, but I do get that the underlying condition of the road is the primary concern of the road engineers since the pothole is only the visible manifestation of a larger condition deterioration. That said, if pothole repairs are disintegrating within a short space of time, we need to know.

Vision Zero / Road Safety

Greater Manchester has talked a good talk on reducing serious injury on our roads, but I really haven’t seen proactive responses. I thought the most interesting comment was that Trafford officers described the Vision Zero team as being ‘resourced’ (as Trafford sees when they regularly meet). My take is that we need to see output from ‘Vision Zero.

Resources:

Presentations submitted to the Scrutiny Committee

Presentation PDF

Traffic Regulation Order Scrutiny Jan 24

I’ve only skimmed the surface of the information submitted to Scrutiny Committee, but I’ve tried to pick out the key elements that are of concern to residents. It’s well worth watching the whole exchange. By all means add your comments below and I’ll try and respond.
April 2, 2025
Sad Passing – John Reilly

He always told me that signing off the installation of cycle lanes and ‘wands’ on Talbot Road went against his better judgement. Whatever the truth of this, he had a habit of installing cycling infrastructure that has stood the test of time.

I always enjoyed working with John. We sat on a number of committees together and we carried on tweeting intermittently to each other after he retired as a councillor. I’m sorry that he has passed away. He made a significant contribution to Trafford.

I’ll always be grateful for the cycleway. In terms of increasing active travel which is the true test of new infrastructure, it’s probably the most successful of all Trafford’s initiatives. I think he knew it would be and that’s why he gave it the go-ahead.

March 31, 2025
Close to water?

In which I look at what makes a town work and why Stretford has waterfront opportunities that it shouldn’t waste.

I don’t want to lie on a beach. I don’t want to swim. Give me a town or small city that I can potter around in, and I’ll happily spend a few days getting to know the place. It’s become my holiday of choice.

The UK has taken a hit since Covid, but there’s still plenty of life in our towns. Tourism plays a part, but being towns means they have to appeal primarily to a local audience. You don’t have to visit many before you see that there are constant markers of what makes a town worth venturing out into.

A town has to have more value than its component parts. Otherwise, it’s effectively a retail park. Tellingly, the most successful towns feel worthwhile visiting whether or not you spend any money at all. They are places to stroll around.

So there has to be a certain scale to a place. If the entire centre can be walked in 10 minutes, the town is not going to have a pull of its own.

The more inherent visual cues a place has, the better. These can be geographic or architectural. We generally agree on whether a town has beauty and interest or whether it’s lacking.

Water often works well.

We are beginning to learn that our brains are hardwired to react positively to water and that being near it can calm and connect us, increase innovation and insight, and even heal what’s broken. Healthy water is crucial to our physiological and psychological well-being, as well as our ecology and economy. We have a “blue mind”.
Céline Cousteau (intro to Blue Mind)

It doesn’t matter whether it’s the sea, a lake, a river, a canal, even a fountain. Water adds to a place.

Trafford is almost defined by its rivers and canals. They provide our boundaries and in the Bridgewater Canal, a spine stretching down from Barton in the north stretching through Stretford, Sale and Altrincham in the south all the way round to Lymm and Warrington in the West.

The canal works well. Sale has made it a vital feature of its town centre. The pubs along the canal are generally surviving against an economic backdrop that is closing so many of our neighbourhood pubs. It might have an industrial heritage but where we’ve opened it out, it works.

However, the planners of Stretford have pulled away from utilising the canalside. They argue that it lacks sufficient frontage, that a retail/leisure development would detract from the revived King Street on the mall site. I think they’re wrong.

The café at the viaduct in Altrincham and from the barge at Brookland do well without the benefit of a town centre to support them. These are small scale operations. The developers have much more space on the canal at Stretford based on just the old sorting office.

I worry that the risk isn’t so much overscaling Stretford as denying it that important critical mass that gives you a stroll around the town centre and gentle walk home.

At some point too, the Essoldo will return to being part of the Stretford offer in one form or another and that might extend the canal frontage on the other side of the bridge.

I don’t want to lose the opportunity to do something exciting with Stretford.

March 10, 2025
Council’s Annual Budget Meeting

Trafford’s annual budget meeting is traditionally the biggest set-piece event of the council year. It typically stages a buoyant ruling party, setting out delivery of its priorities, against the harping of a grieving opposition party. This year, however, felt decidedly different in mood.

This was a difficult budget. Trafford has had to be granted a borrowing facility in order for its finance officer to sign the budget off as ‘robust’. We’ve also been allowed to increase council tax a little more than our neighbouring councils. Whilst that’s a tricky position, it does feel to me as though Trafford is being allowed to begin navigating a course back to sustainability after having been cut adrift by the previous government, whereby an already frugal council was denied the ability to steer clear of rocks.

So, I think I’m probably somewhat more optimistic than the majority of councillors speaking in the budget debate on Monday evening.

A good thing that has emerged from Trafford’s current financial plight is that there is more openness about how Trafford spends council tax payers’ money. We are still short of total clarity, but there’s been a definite positive shift. That transparency will be a prerequisite for pulling out of this. We have to take the public with us.

I’d really like us to complain less about how Trafford is somehow singled out by central government for unfair settlements. If we say it’s unfair then we’ve got to design a formula that gives Trafford more compared to a more deprived borough like Knowsley, a borough regularly cited in council documents. The simple fact is that Governments of both the left and right expect comparatively affluent boroughs to use local residents for income. Whilst the design of council tax has internal flaws, even with reform, Trafford will still be left needing to levy its citizens. So, whatever the form of that local taxation, keeping it low will carry the same risks the next time a government sets limits on how much it can be increased. I don’t believe Local Government Finance reform is going to be our salvation. This issue will return again next year.

Given the preponderance of adult social service demands in depleting the council’s finances, it was surprising only Liberal Democrat councillor Simon Lepori raised the delay in its reform as an issue. He made a good point. It was a shame his party chose, as it usually does, to pick a completely irrelevant diversionary proposal as its budget amendment. The opposition parties struggled. There was no alternative budget proposal and that Lib Dem amendment was effectively about independence for Timperley.

Although the budget passed, the work to keep costs down will have to be a daily obsession for the council. Tom Ross gave the speech of the night and it’s clear he gets this. We need to maintain the transparency and that includes the stress that we’re still next to bottom of the council tax charts.

March 4, 2025
Council Tax and Cones

The fact of Trafford Council being one of only six councils in the country being allowed to increase the council tax we pay by more than the standard 4.99% ceiling set by government has been a shock to people. It’s understandable that residents have asked how Trafford has come to be a special case. I’ve had lots of emails and social media posts. Many of these messages point to cycleway cones on the A56 being the cause of the shortfall in the finances.

I wanted to share below, the reply I am providing to these messages which I hope gives some explanation.

Cycle Lanes

I’ll deal briefly with the cycle lanes first.

We have a problem. Manchester’s roads can’t cope with the increase in cars we’ve seen. We’re nowhere near seeing the peak of car ownership here. It’s increasing every year.

We know where we’re heading if we do nothing but rely on cars for urban transportation.

Houston Peak

Several European nations have tried a different model notably Holland, but also includes mayor led cities such as Paris, London and particularly Seville. Citizens are encouraged where they can to use the car less. They’ve managed to halt the spiral of road widening and new highways within the city. At the same time, it’s had a positive impact on the prosperity. They’re healthier and wealthier.

So, I am quite happy to justify the ‘why’ this is being done. Why we’re encouraging walking, cycling and public transport.

But the A56 cones?

I’m not going to lie and say the cones on the A56 are so easily justified (at least south of Stretford)edit. They were introduced as a Covid emergency measure. If it hadn’t been for Covid, we’d have gone for a proper appraisal and a proper business case. The last Government made us stick with our Covid measures.

I’d have preferred to come back to the A56 when we’d done a lot more town centre work and worked on crossings to get a quicker return in terms of walking and health. So, I struggle to justify the timing, but we’d inevitably have to implement cycling infrastructure on our main route into Manchester at some point.

Ultimately, I don’t think anybody disagrees with the premise that there would be an increase in cycling if all roads were safe to ride.

In terms of the budget, the lanes have been government funded, so they haven’t impacted on our current financial plight. They do ultimately come from the taxes that you and I pay so I don’t dismiss the criticism.

2025 Council Tax

I’m now going to move on to Trafford’s general budget. Trafford has always had a low council tax.

Other than Wigan, (who for historical reasons have substantial reserves) we have the lowest in Greater Manchester and I’m pretty sure it’s with Wigan as the lowest of all the Metropolitan districts nationally. At the same time we depend on Council Tax more than most councils.

It’s argued that we’re affluent, but that only matters if we use that affluence to increase our income and we’ve deliberately kept it low.

Historically, since Council Tax was introduced in the early 90s, it hasn’t mattered which party was in control of Trafford, we’ve kept it low. I am fairly sure that this is the first time in those 30 years a Labour Council in Trafford has proposed a percentage increase that is higher than the norm for the year.

So, for 30 years we’ve been falling further behind. I’d have preferred us to have put a little more into reserves, but that couldn’t be done while chasing this target of lowest council tax. Put it this way, if we had Stockport’s rate of council tax in terms of our spending, we’d not only be in clover, we’d be giving out rebates back to you!

As it is, you can remain assured that you’re still paying the lowest rate in Greater Manchester (bar Wigan) after this increase.

It’s not a great position this year and I apologise. I genuinely believe we have been so lean in council finances that we were always going to come to a year like this where we need to make a correction.

February 21, 2025
Focus on Derbyshire Lane West

We’ve been out and about in Derbyshire Lane West, asking how it’s going. As you can see below, you’ve been saying lots of good things about the area.

But there are things you’d like to see improved…

You don’t feel as safe as you deserve to feel.

This has been raised a few times. The police figures are not too bad, but they don’t tell the whole story. You’ve told us about drug dealing in alleys and instances of self-injecting in the open. The area is not far from well-publicised tragic events involving knives and there has been a lot of worry about an incident in Moss Park about a year ago.

I want to bring the police into this. I’d like to see some community engagement. I’m not sure police surgeries are the answer, but there are actions we need to consider.

It’s not good for anyone if we don’t feel safe enough to engage fully in community activity, particularly if that means children are denied the freedom granted to older generations.

Flytipping and graffiti

We need to do better at clearing flytipping. There’s graffiti on the back of the flats above the shops. People have told me it adds to the general sense of a neighbourhood that’s not looking after itself.

Decline of the road

The state of the speed-humps in particular has been raised. They’re by no means the worst, but I get that people expect better.

Subway under railway

The subway has received some attention lately but it needs major investment. Andy Burnham wants all Greater Manchester stations to be accessible. The condition of the Humphrey Park subway means it can not be said to be wheelchair accessible.

Actions

I’m going to talk to the police over the general perception of personal safety in the neighbourhood. I’m already talking to Trafford over graffiti.

Ideally, I’d like to improve general engagement with the area. The Friends of Moss Park is not currently active because people have left the area.

I almost live too close to the area, because it’s easy to take things for granted and I’d like us to improve our channels of communication with the area.

I’d really love for people to engage with the comments below and tell me how we need to respond. Should we be doing more in terms of litter picking for instance? I’d suggest public meetings but is there an appetite?

I’m intending to update the site on how we’re getting on. But please do comment below!

February 18, 2025