The Economics of Hope

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.

Monday

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?

Friday

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.

Image by Károly Váltó from Pixabay

Council gets back in its stride

Monday
Executive Meeting of Council

Top item on agenda was the consultation on ‘home to school’ transport. Essentially we can anticipate that after the consultation there will be much less support for getting children to schools that are further away. This includes children with special needs and those who are attending religious schools. Pupils on free school meals will be protected.

At present all children receive a travel pass if their school is more than 3 miles away. This is at an annual cost of £425,000. The proposal is to grant the pass only if the family has no choice for example if their nearest Grammar School is more than 3 miles away. There will not be grant of a pass based on preference even if this a preference for single sex or a particular religious denomination. There will also be tightening of the rules governing transport for Special Educational Needs with yearly reviews.

We on the Labour side rightly vigorously opposed the proposed cuts. I recognise that an online poll in the messenger suggests that people are prepared to see this provision reduced but we should not make it easy for Conservatives to make cuts to services. They are choosing to throw money at the cricket club and make cuts to families.

Although receiving less attention, it could be argued that another item on the agenda had greater long term significance.

The Core Strategy is Trafford’s plan for development in the borough. It designates areas that are a priority for residential, commercial or preserved as greenspace. It works very much in conjunction with the City Region strategy and as such the various borough’s keepa close eye on their partner authority’s aspirations.

Monday’s council executive was asked firstly to define the Regional Centre as it exists within Trafford. At regional level this had been defined as Pomona Docks and Trafford Wharfside. These areas are therefore seen as primary economic drivers of the Manchester City Region, ensuring that the Regional Centre continues to provide the main focus for business, retail, leisure, cultural and tourism development in the City Region. In other words they are the places for dynamic high quality developments but where exactly are they? (where do they begin and end?).

Trafford Wharfside in particular required greater definition. We knew that the Imperial War Museum was ‘Wharfside’ but was the Manchester United ground?

Well, Trafford have designated Manchester United as within that Wharfside area and essentially the ‘regional centre’ pretty much includes that part of Trafford Park from Warren Bruce Road up to Pomona see map .

So it includes a sizeable portion of Gorse Hill Ward.

More contentious was the definition of the City Region’s Inner Area as it lay within Trafford. I know this sounds like something from a 1980s BT commercial with Maureen Lipman in it, but it matters whether you’re inner or outer.

The inner areas should be the focus for residential development in order to secure a significant increase in their population, and to secure the improvement of community facilities and the creation of sustainable communities. The emphasis will be on providing a good range of quality housing, The Inner Areas have enormous potential, which, if left untapped, will limit the ability of the Regional Centre to secure investment and generate further growth. Development within the Inner Areas will boost overall economic growth in the City Region, reduce local inequalities (such as worklessness) and deprivation and provide a clear alternative to further decentralisation and the unsustainable commuting patterns associated with it.

Neither Manchester City Council nor Salford City Council wanted Trafford to include in its Inner Area that part of Trafford Park known as the Trafford Centre Rectangle. That is the area bounded by the M60 however Trafford is keen to include it. So Trafford is submitting that the inner area includes all of what we know as Trafford Park, all of the Gorse Hill and Firswood neighbourhoods together with all of Old Trafford.

‘Historically, the Inner Areas have been associated with the allocation of major regeneration funds and have therefore tended to be associated with some of the City Region’s most deprived and under-populated neighbourhoods close to the Regional Centre. In more recent years, however, the role of the City Region’s Inner Areas has been evolving. These areas represent a marriage of need and opportunity – large scale residential development can attract people to locations from which the Regional Centre is easily accessible and can also regenerate local communities’.

You can see why Salford and Manchester were threatened by the Trafford Centre Rectangle’s inclusion but it’s important that Trafford is included as a generator of economic growth and we can expect to see developers wanting to utilise the areas described as ‘inner’. See map of proposed ‘inner area.

Tuesday

Lakes Estate walkabout with officers, Councillor Acton and residents. Main concerns were the state of the road surface on Coniston and Langdale. I’ve raised this repeatedly and as a consequence both are scheduled for this year. I have to say that whilst they may not be the deepest potholes on Coniston it’s clear that it was the thinnest coating of tarmac I’ve ever witnessed on a road or pavement and no wonder that it’s completely disintegrating.

Annual Council – A largely ceremonial affair with the installation of a new mayor who this year will be Labour’s Jane Baugh. She’ll make an excellent mayor. She chairs the council meeting like she was born to it.

Wednesday

Meeting of shadow executive.

Stretford Community Panel – the panels are changing and we need to prepare for the process by describing the neighbourhood needs.

Thursday

Meeting with the doctors at Gorse Hill Medical Centre about their needs for improved facilities

Evening meeting at St Matthews as a listening event for Kate Green. Good to hear everyone’s views. There was a wide range of differing opinions from those that wanted an end to overseas aid and others who saw as a priority the maintenance of public services. It’s clear that people are being hit hard but and I think there’s a growing competition over priorities. I suspect that the cost of EC membership will be one area that grows in significance to people.

Friday

Covered Councillor Walsh’s advice surgery. No visitors.

Sunday

Door knocking on the Lakes Estate with Councillor Walsh.

Tuesday

Action for Sustainable Living Event at Sevenways Church. We listened to community activists from Moss Side who’d turned their ‘alleys’ into community spaces with neighbourhood planting. The Trafford approach has been that Gating Schemes have been seen seen as a way of keeping crime on the outside but no work has been done to turn the alley into a resource. ‘Here’s your gates and here’s your key’. The trouble is that fly tipping and rubbish have still had to be dealt with. The gates on their own have only made moderate improvements to the space behind gardens. Elsewhere on this website we’ve highlighted the Seedley and Langworthy gating schemes. Now we’re seeing that Moss Side is also getting much better results. It’s time we we made some progress in Trafford. ASL are looking at using the community spirit to enhance the subway area at the Stretford Mall / Chester Road crossroads. It would be great if we could bottle some of that Moss Side imagination and sprinkle a little in this corner of Stretford.

Photo by Jan Kahánek on Unsplash

Planning – don’t you just despair?

There’s something about planning committee that just grates with me. Maybe it’s the faux inclusivity and bonhommie, maybe it’s the fake veneer of non-political objectivity. Every cell of the body of every councillor on every planning committee is by definition ‘political’. It’s why we have councillors on the committee; to provide that local say. At the same time, they’re required to deny the local and maintain the illusion of rigorous quasi judicial impartiality.

Having spent a year on planning myself, I know that the councillors for the vast majority of cases do genuinely apply an objectivity to the decision making. Sometimes though issues arise where it’s impossible to prise out of the political. Voters would not understand the point of a local councillor who spoke against the interests of those voters in favour of the greater good.

Sometimes you wonder whether the faux objectivity is worth the effort. Trafford’s Conservative members of the planning committee got themselves tied up in so many knots over the Tesco/Cricket Club development that it seems they’ve subjected to Trafford to years of legal challenge. In first declaring one by one that they were against the Tesco development due to its size, but 30 mins later voting for it when asked to do so by the legal officer, it left the doors wide open to challenge. In short, Trafford’s Tories dropped their planning committee members right in it and left them with the most impossible of tasks.

Thursday’s planning meeting was another frustrating affair although for an entirely different reason. The planning committee devoted more time to an advertising hoarding in Urmston upon which there was a complete consensus against granting consent than it did to a major 700 bed hotel near to Old Trafford Stadium that officers were recommending should be allowed to operate except on match days! This is a development of huge strategic importance. but officers have been allowed to impose the most bureaucratic strictures on its operation. International fans will have to transfer to a different hotel on the day of the match and come back by tram or taxi for fear of creating congestion in the car parks. I am one of the two most pro-cycling councillors in Trafford (I bow only to Cllr Chilton) but there is no way that this hotel requires parking for 97 bicycles as officers were insisting. It’s absolute madness. Where was the discussion in ensuring local employment? A colleague suggested the discussion was getting too in-depth and that was that (I wish he’d similarly brought discussion on the advertising hoarding to an end on the basis they were all in agreement). I absolutely want the hotel development to proceed and I want it to be a success. We need growth, we need jobs. We should not be letting officers impose ludicrous and unworkable conditions at the behest of no one but guidance. It is not enough to say the developers can come back and get things changed. With such an important project, it should be about working with them to make it happen rather than imposing unneccessary obstacles.

With that I am perhaps more amenable to the pilot scheme to allow Trafford Park businesses to set their own planning guidance announced yesterday than I should be. We shall see. Planning can certainly be improved in Trafford.

Kitchen Slops

From next week we’ll be able to put kitchen slops in the green bin. More details are here.

So what is the position if you live in a flat? I’m afraid this has been announced without prior discussion. We don’t know the position on people in flats, we don’t know whether retaillers have been forewarned to stock up on kitchen caddies or compostible bags. We’re racing to catch up with this announcement

Meanwhile the council is packing its excess and obsolescent belongings into a skip and is clearing out of the town hall to the Quays. Expect massive confusion  With the best will in the world I think it’s safe to assume things will be lost.

Apology for this week’s update being a succession of gripes but I think that just about sums it up.

image: the AI keyboard warrior commissioned via Copilot by the author

Election over – now back to those issues

The Lostock neighbourhood is suffering a resurgence of youth nuisance. Partly it’s as a consequence of the hot weather, partly it’s due to design faults in the new development that we were well aware of before it was built, partly it’s due to an inability to fix gates. Whatever the reason, it’s taking extra police resources and causing stress to residents. The issue is being raised at neighbourhood groups and on the street. Most of the time the kids are doing nothing more than play football but the new build has provided places that are just inappropriate.

Dave Acton and myself are arranging a meeting with the Housing Trust, Police, Council, Residents and Arawak Walton

Saturday

Advice Surgery – Lostock Library

Sunday

Trip up to United to see car parking problems ahead of Chelsea match

Monday

Lostock Residents Association – More on the continuing problems facing the Lostock area. However all is not bad and the Lostock Inter Generational Project, young people have been running from Lostock Youth Club has been nominated for a ‘Kids Count’ award.

Image by Károly Váltó from Pixabay