Canal27ways

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  • Impressions of a council that’s not sleeping well

    Impressions of a council that’s not sleeping well

    Happening at the Council

    The Care Quality Commission visited Trafford for its inspection of Adult Social Services last week. This is a big moment for Trafford.

    Council Meeting last week

    Political Motions to council (5)

    Link to the Motions section on the Council meeting agenda

    What can I say?

    I did as I was told. I kept my mouth shut as instructed. I voted as whipped. 

    Ultimately, it was a mix of posturing and moral scolding. The more we are removed from the neighbourhoods we represent, the more we inhabit an alternate universe. Nobody wins and you won’t hear of these motions again. It’s just hierarchies reinforcing themselves. The people sat on the council dais win. That is all. 

    We’ve got to find new ways of highlighting serious issues.

    Council Finances

    The period from October to December is typically the time when the next year’s budget comes together. Assumptions are made about the Government’s settlement and other unknowns such as pay settlements. 

    I notice my old friend, former Councillor Jonathan Coupe, has been raising the absence of a draft budget.

    Screenshot

    I was scheduled to be a member of a scrutiny committee from late summer. It never met and meetings scheduled for December have now been cancelled. Jonathan is right to question where we are.

    I think this tells you how much depends on the final Local Government Settlement. We are never given the actual date, but it was the 18th December, which triggered our application for Exceptional Financial Support from the Government in 2024. Given that £9.6m of that financial support was not consolidated, but was actually a borrowing facility that will have to be paid back over time,  I would have preferred a worst case budget for 2026/27. I hope the Government understands the financial precipice I suspect we’re standing over.

    The monitoring report for the current year is to be presented at tonight’s executive.  It looks like we’re on course to spend that £9.6m capitalisation. All things being equal, that would leave us needing to make up that £9.6m just to stand still without any increases in costs. 

    The government has recently published its fair funding review. We won’t know the full impact until the settlement is published, but prioritising support for the most deprived councils won’t necessarily help Trafford. 

    Executive Meeting 8th December

    Apart from the current in-year budget position there’s a couple of other items on the agenda;

    • Potential compulsory purchase New Street Altrincham – L&Q have a development there.
    • Memorandum of Understanding with L&Q on future working collaboration

    I would have preferred this memorandum of understanding to have undergone pre-decision scrutiny. Were L&Q working collaboratively when they emptied Circle Court?

    • Corporate Performance 13 indicators rated Green, 16 rated amber/red
    • Activation of Trafford’s Cultural Strategy – go ahead for Trafford Is… platform
    • Urmston Plan – all councils do this type of thing and you’re left feeling wouldn’t it have been better to just do some implementation. We knew that the Urmston Market site was frustrating residents. Has this ‘plan’ brought about any resolution?
    • Advanced Manufacturing Skills Programme – our contribution to a GM wide programme.

    Planning Committee applications

    None within the ward, but Stretford Town Centre is important to many of our residents. This will be heard on Thursday evening.

    • Lacy Street – Residential development (use class C3) of 53 dwellings with associated amenity space, access, car and cycle parking, external landscaping, drainage and other associated works.

      The recommendation is for members of the committee to grant this application from Trafford Council. I’m on record as opposing it as an unsuitable use of this prime location.

    It’s hard to imagine a less walking/cycling friendly junction. Just as the Urmston plan is advocating raised crossings, Stretford proposes fast corners to the junctions in the centre of Stretford. Front doors and gardens onto Chester Road are brave at best.

  • Switching off from Politics and playing the music loud.

    Switching off from Politics and playing the music loud.

    Following one of the worst council meetings I can remember and there’s been some bad ones, it was nice to confirm I’ve got tickets for Neil Young / Elvis Costello in the summer.

    Music is important to me. I’m still searching for a radio feed that gives me a perfect mix and no talk. BBC 6 music is closest in my tastes, but they hardly ever shut up.

    ……and the same goes for council! – 😊

    I sometimes listen to Radio Paradise from the states. And I’ve been playing Fip Monde from France for (+15) years since it was featured on the Today programme – it’s world music and it’s rare to hear anything I’ve heard before. Still more often than not I just ask Alexa to play a particular song and let the algorithm take over.

    Regardless of this December is the time for the music streamers to tell listeners what they’ve been listening to the most and I can never resist checking it.

    This is mine. I’d love hear yours. I don’t know how accessible they are if you’re not signed up. I know I can still play somethings on Spotify despite not being with them for a long time.

  • Pee, Poo and Paper Rules and a trip to Davyhulme Works.

    Pee, Poo and Paper Rules and a trip to Davyhulme Works.

    A treat to visit the treatment works.

    Davyhulme Sewage Works is a fascinating place. I was one of three Trafford councillors to take up a guided tour provided by United Utilities. It’s a place I’ve always been aware of; famously because of its smells, but also because of the space it takes up alongside the ship canal. As a youngster I used to cycle over to Barton Airport to watch the planes and we’d take short-cuts over water courses and outflows to get to the locks. It’s a huge site.

    The pong associated with the sewage works has noticeably receded. I’m not going to pretend it’s a become a canal-side idyll, but there’s no doubt there’s been significant improvement. It was also apparent that the technology is also improving even if the basic infrastructure still has components of the original 1894 works.

    Davyhulme is long associated with technological innovation and we really don’t give enough attention to the development here in 1914. Searching the web just throws up the odd burst of enthusiastic exaltation popping up anywhere in the world.

    Examples from the web

    En 1914, les chercheurs anglais Ardern et Lockett découvrent que la dépollution est beaucoup plus rapide lorsque l’eau usée à traiter est mise en contact avec une biomasse épuratrice [4] déjà formée. Ils déposent ainsi le premier brevet sur le procédé d’épuration qui sera dénommé procédé à boues activées.

    A Call for Recognition of Ardern and Lockett in Trafford

    How did we come to miss celebrating the centenary in 2014? Ardern and Lockett are celebrated by sewage engineers all over the world. Why no statues, no streets named after them? Are we ashamed of poo?

    Where are we now?

    The process Ardern and Lockett developed is still in use all over the world. The demand on it has never been greater. Of course it’s been improved and there are new investments coming through.

    Davyhulme wastewater treatment works is set to undergo an initial investment of around £350m over the next five years to ensure it meets the needs of a growing population and higher environmental standards that will improve water quality in the Manchester Ship Canal.

    Link to press release

    But…

    Clearly, I welcome this investment. However, it is long overdue.

    I don’t believe that water should be privatised. It is to the everlasting shame of the Conservative Party that we allowed our infrastructure to deteriorate to such an extent that processes I’m so proud of at Davyhulme and each and every other treatment works have to by-passed when the capacity can’t cope with sewage discharged directly into the rivers and canals.

    We are where we are and whilst I abhor the use of rivers, I’ve got to recognise that the infrastructure that first receives the rain water as it comes down on us in ever increasing downpours is under the council control.

    We’ve got to keep our drains and sewers clear. We’ve got to encourage each other to respect the drains and toilet flushes. Wipes should never go down the loo. Even if the manufacturers claim their product to be bio-degradable, the wipes never degrade quick enough not to contribute to the giant fat-balls that block the sewars. And even when the wipes make it through the system, they’ve still got to be removed and taken to landfill.

    Mea Culpa

    It’s not just wet wipes. I might not be guilty of disposing of those in the system, but I saw the amount of grit and small pebbles that make it through to Davyhulme, which is but a small proportion of the amount building up in our drains.

    It was impossible to avoid thinking of ‘Stretford Beach’ and the amount of pebbles building up from there in the drains. Should we ever be using pebble and grit in ways that it’s impossible to avoid large amounts entering the drains?

    Let’s keep the drains flowing.

    Finally,

    Strongly recommend a visit to Davyhulme Sewage Works. It’s absolutely fascinating.

    In which a visit to Davyhulme Sewage works becomes a cause of local historical pride; and a rethink in terms of what what we're putting in our drains.
    Edward Ardern smoking and William Lockett sat front right (photographer unknown)

    Resources

    A Visit to Cassington Sewage Treatment Works – 12-29-2021 in Oxford, UK

    Davyhulme Sewage Works – Wikipedia

    Call for Nominations for MEWE SG Awards: Ardern-Lockett Award 2025, Early and Mid-Career Awards 2025 – International Water Association

    A historical appraisal of the significance of Ardern and Lockett by Nigel Horan, reader in civil engineering

    Featured image at top of post is copyright of United Utilities and is published under legitimate interest use.

  • Gloomy Outlook for Council Finances

    Gloomy Outlook for Council Finances

    Fierce Winds Conspire, The Dark clouds Do Gather……

    There are times when, a good report with confirmation that you are doing everything that you should do, is the last thing you want to hear. The storm is coming still. 

    We’ve actually had two reports on the council’s sustainability, one following the other. Neither of the two reports provides a route to delivering council services at a level the public aspires to.

    The second of these, our Corporate Peer Challenge, from the Local Government Association is stark reading, but it does little beyond telling us that we’re right to be concerned.

    The earlier report from the Chartered Institute of Public Finance and Accountancy (CIPFA) is the one that’s providing the action plan that came to Accounts and Audit Committee this week.

    There’s a danger that the issues are seen as temporary problems of liquidity that the government could solve. There’s a sense that we’re a special case and it’s nothing the public should worry about; we just need Government to listen. I worry that we’re internalising problems that we won’t solve without the public owning both the problems and the solutions.

    The public has an expectation that our parks and streets should be maintained to a much better standard than the council even dreams about. They do understand that not enough is being spent on them. They therefore have an expectation that if council tax rises, they will see an improvement. The very fact that we’re unable to meet that expectation is proof that the system is broken.

    I think the latest pronouncements from Government on future local government spending suggests that any hope of special treatment for Trafford has now receded. We’re going to have to deal with this.

    How do we balance the cost of funding statutory provision in child and adult care with delivering our everyday environmental services? Can we corral those everyday services so that they are directly commissioned by communities and not subjected to competing pressures in social care? How does community wealth building thrive in the current environment?

    Ideally, we can work with the combined authority and Mayor Andy Burnham. However, the risk is that the Government’s targeting of funding puts us on a different trajectory to most of our Greater Manchester colleague councils. That risk only emphasises the fact that communities are the only allies still irrevocably facing the coming storm with us.

    We must not fall into myopic thinking that balancing the books will be the only test that the public places on us. More than anything they judge us on the state of their neighbourhood. If we can’t insulate spending on neighbourhoods within the council’s spend, I think we ought to be considering alternative models. It may be time for parish councils and/or area boards to come of age.

    Photo by Eg Civic Ferio from Pexels: https://www.pexels.com/photo/sea-under-a-storm-cloud-18608634/

  • Scrutinised: Highway Spend

    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.

  • This is not the way to do it! (welfare reform)

    Reform is needed. The number of people on benefits due to ill health has increased exponentially. Long waiting times within the NHS are contributing to this, but they aren’t the whole story.

    The government has clearly determined that financial incentives to be ‘on the sick’ rather than unemployed contribute to this. If this was all they were looking at, I think there would be room for useful reform, but only at the edges.

    The government has instead chosen a stark change to Personal Independence Payments. Applicants will need to achieve a single 4-point score in the daily living assessments.

    Daily Living Activities

    The Resolution Foundation think tank said the tightening of PIP eligibility would mean between 800,000 and 1.2 million people losing support of between £4,200 and £6,300 per year by the end of the decade. That’s a big change. My colleague, Cllr James Wright has pointed out that Pip often enables work rather than compensating the lack of it.

    James is a passionate Wolves fan*.

    I am worried that Rachel Reeves is relying on the wrong advisers. There are welfare changes that would make sense, bringing prescription charges in line with state pension age, for example. She seems to have bought into the line that we can solve the economy by removing welfare rather than reforming work, which is what is really needed.

    Rachel would benefit from listening to Sean Farrington of the BBC. His radio programme ‘Payslip Britain’ highlights the extent to which work and lack of control within it is damaging our wellbeing. Nine million people not in work and not looking for work is a mindblowing figure. I remember the UK reaching a million unemployed in the seventies. It was considered a seismic change. If work is negatively affecting our well-being, I’m not sure that being cruel to disabled people is going to motivate people back into work.

    Sean Farrington is a passionate Wolves Fan*

    Listen to Payslip Britain

    For the avoidance of doubt, were I to be given a vote, I would vote against the changes to PIP.

    *I only mention the Wolves allegiances, so that both could be reassured that they weren’t alone in this world or Manchester. 😊But this radio programme is a must listen!