This week will, of course, see a gathering of the most powerful people on earth, in one room, at one time, trying to solve the most pressing issues of our time. Yes, it’s the final meeting of Bury Council for this municipal year.

Unlike the G20, which I’m guessing I probably won’t be able to get into, Bury Council meetings are open to the public, and anyone can come along and watch the fun. Why don’t you? Yes, granted, England are on. But I honestly think the last good England game was in 1966, whereas the last good Council meeting was more recent than that (I guess). So maybe it’s worth a punt.

This time there’s a potentially very interesting debate on the future of secondary school provision in the borough, amidst the ongoing “will there be a high school in Radcliffe?” debate which has been rumbling on for at least the last thousand years.

As well as that, there’s the usual knockabout fun during Executive Question Time. This is like a low budget version of Prime Minister’s Question Time, where exasperated opposition members like myself try and retrieve honest information from the people in charge, only to be thwarted by a torrent of monotonous robot-speak in the form of pre-prepared answers written by officers, read out by the Executive Members, and often bearing no relation at all to the substance of the question.

Current rules on questions, introduced by the Conservatives who were evidently concerned about their ability to read out pre-prepared answers without stumbling over words and sounding genuinely baffled (and rightly so), means that only a very limited number can be asked and answered. Since the lucky ones are chosen on a first-come, first-served basis, the only way to be sure of getting your question answered is to write in with it ages in advance. So expect questions on Wednesday about Bury Council’s ability to cope with the decimalisation of the pound, and our reaction to the tragic passing of George III.

Unfortunately, this rule means that really pressing issues, like what can be done about joblessness, the local economy and the future of public services whilst public debt mounts by the second, can’t be discussed. Still, probably best to leave that up to the G20.

Rick

The Bury Times reports this week on MP Ivan Lewis’ belated jumping onto the graffiti bandwagon. After months of my Councillor colleagues and I banging our heads against the Town Hall’s brick walls to get some graffiti cleaned, Mr Lewis joined us on a graffiti clean up last week, and has this week launched some Facebook groups against the graffiti plague.

He should be commended for both these things, and now at least Labour has joined us Lib Dems to present a united front against this ongoing problem.

However, the Council’s response in the article is such a ridiculous pile of meaningless waffle that it almost makes me want to go and spray some graffiti saying as much right on the town hall steps. In response to growing community anger, and now the combined efforts of all 9 Prestwich Councillors and the MP, the Council said:

“We are actively working with a range of partners to engage with local community groups to find sustainable solutions to this difficult and distressing problem. Through schemes such as the street care pledge, individuals are empowered to take responsibility for their own local neighbourhood to help tackle the issue of litter and graffiti.”

What a load of utter, meaningless bunkum. I don’t think I’ve seen a bigger collection of nothingness masquerading as a sentence in a long time. It gives the community nothing but more tripe pretending to be action.

I have been elected to represent the community, and I think I have my finger on the pulse here. I know that the thing the community want least of all in the whole world is a load of incomprehensible management speak talking about initiatives which have so far achieved nothing. What we want is simple, effective action. Right now, for this problem, forget ”a range of partners,” and forget “engaging with community groups.” Instead, stop talking to us like children and DO SOMETHING!!!

I don’t even know what “The Street Care Pledge” is, but it’s clearly failing since the Council, who own the streets, don’t care enough about them to clean graffiti. Instead they are content to let Prestwich end up looking like a vandal’s playground, and respond with the offer of useless graffiti kits.

The solution is clear. It doesn’t take more meaningless words to explain. It takes the following three easy steps which don’t need further engagement, partnership working or anything else:

1) Council staff spraying walls with graffiti on them right now

2)  Council staff spraying walls with graffiti on them in the future as soon as it’s reported

3) A strong statement by the Council and the Police together that graffiti vandals will be caught and appropriately punished, and that their crimes will be swiftly and repeatedly removed until they leave us alone.

That’s what I’d like to see from the Council right now, today. Not more complete tosh from this do-nothing Tory administration. The community will only feel empowered when the organisation which holds the real power actually exercises some of it to the community’s benefit. Until they do, the community will continue to feel angry, cynical and victimised. And they’ll continue to feel that the Council simply isn’t listening. The way to fix problems is to actually fix them, not fob the responsibility off onto us with warm words and nothing else.

If  the Council was as good at keeping our streets clean as it is at providing words rather than action, I’d be able to see my face reflected in the tarmac. Their response in the paper is simply not good enough.

Rick

Last night at the Local Area Partnership meeting, the promoter of this summer’s Oasis concerts at Heaton Park was present to answer resident’s questions. And I have to say he answered them all very convincingly.

Naturally, the influx of 210,000 people over three nights into Heaton Park is alarming, especially for residents living close to the park. And, having been at the front at Oasis gigs in the past myself, I know that some of their followers have a less than conservative view of the best way to behave at such events.

But I have to say that the promoter (a former Prestwich resident himself) seemed genuinely concerned about these problems, and spoke convincingly about the full range of security, traffic management and pollution issues that the concerts will bring up.

Full details will be sent to all residents living near to the park closer to the time. But for now, I am reassured on a lot of fronts. There will be a very high police presence, paid for by the promoters, in addition to the normal police that the area would expect on a normal evening. The crowd will enter the park using the regular entrances, but at the end of the concert the crowd will be directed only along main roads, and to Bowker Vale Metrolink Station rather than Heaton Park (which will be closed late on). Security will prevent side-street parking for concert-goers, and there will be a park and ride from Bowlee. Every ticket holder will be sent information on these arrangements to minimise disruption, and there is a strict curfew of 11pm with heavy fines if broken.

The streets will be cleaned early each morning following the concerts by specially hired cleaners, and security staff will be on hand throughout.

The promoters are a Manchester company with decades of experience of putting on large scale concerts like this. They said that they have been trying to make a success of a green field site in Manchester for some time. Now they are confident that it can work, and have gone for Heaton Park.

There may still be problems on the nights, but there will be a helpline to report them (of which details will be sent to residents nearer the time). There are also a few outstanding issues to be confirmed, such as arrangements for St Monica’s School and in Simister which may have a lot of foot traffic. But the promoters were very keen to have separate meetings with these interest groups and others to put people’s minds at rest.

In the meantime, I am much more confident of the arrangements in place, and hopefully this will be a success which can put Prestwich on the map as a major concert venue, whilst at the same time minimising disruption for residents.

Here’s hoping it works, and thanks to the promoters for what I thought was an excellent session last night.

Rick

One of the downsides to the Local Area Partnership meetings is that often we are helpless in the face of very reasonable requests for action from residents. Last night’s hot topics were, unsurprisingly, alley gating, graffiti, litter and dog mess. These are the “usual suspects,” raised every time to us as Councillors. And every time we have to make the same apology for the Council’s woeful inaction, unwillingness to listen, and shameful failure to provide a decent service.

Sometimes we have to explain to people that we are not the Council itself, but merely the people’s representative to the Council. It must be as frustrating to them as it is to us that our powers to actually affect change are often so small. Sometimes the Council are nothing more than a giant brick wall for me to repeatedly bang my head against, and it’s difficult to explain that to local people without sounding like a failure. People rightly say that it isn’t hard to empty the dog bins more often and make some progress cleaning the graffiti off some walls. But the bureacracy and crazy crap that gets in the way of this actually happening makes me wonder how anything ever gets done at all anywhere in Bury.

Last night, once again, we bemoaned a complete lack of progress on policies about graffiti and alley-gating, both of which the community have been crying out for for as long as I’ve been a Councillor. The chair of the meeting, Cllr Vic D’Albert, quite rightly said that what has taken the Council two years to not yet do could have been written by him in twenty minutes. I reckon I could’ve done it in fifteen, and that’s a sleight on the Council rather than Vic! And these are just policies we’re talking about, remember. Not the actual action on alley-gating and graffiti which needs to flow from these policies to make any improvements.

So I ask myself what the people of Prestwich are asking increasingly vocally: “What do we pay our Council Tax for, and why is nobody listening to us?”

The alleys remain dangerous and dirty. Graffiti and dog dirt goes uncleaned, and last night I found myself telling a crowd of residents that I just don’t believe the Council’s claims that they sweep every street every six weeks because, frankly, the evidence suggests that they don’t. They certainly don’t do it properly.

What is the point of having local representatives if they’re reduced to begging for action on the tiniest things, and then are effectively ignored? We aren’t asking for much, just low-cost responses to genuine community problems. If I was asking for the Richard Baum Memorial Highway to be built alongside the Prestwich Monorail system at a cost of billions, I’d understand if nothing happens. I’m asking for dangerous alleys to be gated, and for graffiti to be cleaned. There’s no earthly reason why we should get knocked back so frequently. These are the community’s priorities and, therefore, they should be the Council’s.

I’m sick of being an apologist for a shower of members and officers at the town hall content to do nothing for Prestwich. Shrugging my shoulders and telling residents that I understand their frustrations is not why I became a Councillor.

I shouldn’t have to rely on hoping that the press reads this blog and shames the Council into responding. They should do it because they are public servants and this is what the public wants.

Rick

Last night’s Local Area Partnership (LAP) was a packed and busy affair, and a success I think.

There must have been at least 50 people in the audience to hear updates from the business of the Partnership over the last couple of months, and to hear three very important presentations as well as put their questions to LAP members like Councillors and the police. Say what you want about the merits of “partnership working,” but these meetings certainly draw a crowd.

Although a lot of the issues that residents brought up remind me of the frustrations we continue to face about the Council’s lack of good work in Prestwich (of which more above), the bulk of the meeting was spent on very successful and useful presentations on Prestwich Festival, the Oasis concert and the regeneration plans for the town centre.

The Festival is looking extremely promising. It will run for 35 days from mid-May to mid-June, and there are already 25 confirmed events, from the Carnival and Clough weekend to small events across Prestwich, with more in the pipeline and lots of local businesses chipping in with offers, discounts and sales at Festival time. There’ll be more details nearer the time including a leaflet to households across Prestwich with full details of what’s going on and how to take part.

I’ll write more about Oasis in a minute above, suffice to say that a lot of questions were answered and fears put to rest.

On regeneration, there were exciting plans revealed for the redevelopment of the town centre by Hollins Murray Group (who own the Longfield Centre). The URBED study into the future of Prestwich has of course become a vision that the community has signed up to. We need to get it adopted by the Council, but in the meantime it’s there for all to see (even if Tesco don’t like it). There will be lots of parts to the eventual regeneration, including traffic and Bury New Road, parks, health centre etc, and the Longfield Centre bit of it is probably the highest profile bit. And so it was interesting to get a first look at these plans, which were positively received on the whole I think.

Other news emerging from last night – crime has dropped in the area, including a 1/3 drop in anti-social behaviour, which is good news. And the Police have reported that they’ve caught a prolific graffiti vandal, who’s confessed to 62 offences. Hopefully he’ll be cleaning them all off very soon. Preferably with his tongue, although I imagine not.

All in all a good night, and hopefully the audience of local people went home happier and more reassured than they were when they arrived.

Rick

Another story in the press today about the government’s increasingly manic collection of our personal data, and the worrying levels to which powers to check up on us are being taken by the authorities.

The party have revealed (after a request made under the Freedom of Information Act) that councils up and down the country have been using the Regulations on Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA) thousands of times to snoop on people doing all manner of things.

Naturally the party is apoplectic about this, but I am slightly less worried about the fact that RIPA is being used at all, and more worried that It’s being used so staggeringly ineffectually.

Julia Goldsworthy MP (our Local Government spokesperson in the commons) has revealed that RIPA was authorised for use 10,000 times in the last five years by Councils. This has got the coverage, and rightly so, because it’s a shockingly high number of times for Councils to have used powers originally designed to fight terrorism. The authorisations were also made by relatively junior Council officers in lots of cases, and this is worrying too. But for me the most alarming statistic was that only 9% of these authorisations actually resulted in a conviction.

This is disturbing for a couple of reasons. Either the powers themselves aren’t sufficient to secure convictions. Or, more probably, the Councils using them rush to do so far too quickly, don’t consider how and when they’re going to use them, and end up wasting a vast amount of time and resources spying on people going about their daily business.

For me, it’s not just a civil liberties issue, it’s a value for money issue. And to me, the lack of value for money makes the civil liberties issue come into sharper focus.

The party is citing “minor” crimes like dog-fouling as an example of where RIPA shouldn’t be used, but I’m not sure I agree that we should just blanket ban the use of RIPA for “small time” crimes. I know how incredibly difficult it is to secure convictions for these types of crimes, and the disproportionately damaging effects that these crimes have on community relations, faith in public services, and the spirit of communities. If there’s a way to stop it, I’m interested to learn how.

Witness statements often aren’t enough, and it’s virtually impossible to get any other type of evidence. As a result, this type of low level, but hugely annoying, crime persists, and the offenders go unpunished.

Using surveillance powers has the potential to be a huge help in addressing this issue. But only if used proportionately, effectively, and with results at the end of it. They should only be used as a last resort when there’s already a weight of evidence to back up their use. This is clearly not happening now, as demonstrated by the thousands of uses of the power and the complete lack of convictions. Not only is this evidence of sloppy disregard for civil liberties and a lazy way of trying to catch offenders, but it damages faith in fighting crime and in new technologies to do so.

The government’s complete disregard for civil liberties never ceases to amaze me. But if the technology exists to fight crime, are we not better to try to make sure it’s used properly and effectively for all sorts of crime, rather than try to suggest what types of crimes it’s used for? RIPA needn’t be a snooper’s charter if the potential snoopers do their jobs properly. A crime is a crime is a crime, whether it’s dog fouling or anything else. And if there’s a way to stop it which doesn’t abuse civil liberties and proportionately and effectively uses powers, should we not use that way to stop that crime?

Rick

I criticise the council a fair bit on here, because often they’re rubbish. But, credit where it’s due, they often provide a good service, and on occasion excel themselves. And tonight I have cause to congratulate them after we had to call on them to remove a dog which had implanted itself firmly in our lives!

Tamsin rang me at work to say that she’d seen a dog dicing with death outside our house, playing “Run Me Over! I Dare You!” with a number of passing cars. She went and rescued it from its predicament, but then it wouldn’t leave her alone despite her efforts. It didn’t have a collar and when I got home it wouldn’t tell me where it lived despite me asking politely. And so we had to ring the Council dog wardens via the switchboard.

Despite no prior warning, and the time of day (after 5pm), they were round our house in half an hour to take the dog away, and had a nifty little machine that could tell us whether it had been chipped or not. Thankfully it had, and will be reunited with its owner courtesy of the very lovely lady in the dog van.

So well done Bury Council and its dog wardens!

Rick 

A couple of days ago I heard that the people of Branksome Avenue in the ward had been living in a trench-ridden mire for three months. The light-replacement work commenced after Christmas had been finished save for one bulb, but nobody had bothered filling in the quite substantial holes left behind. As a result of this sparkling display of public service excellence, doing anything on the street like parking or walking was rendered fairly difficult.

But, there is now light at the end of the tunnel and, indeed, lights at the end of Branksome Avenue. I have been told that the reinstatement of the road will be completed today, and that the final street light will be installed on April 6th.

Great news! And all the street lights completed just in time for the Tories at the Town Hall to consider switching half of them off at night to save money.

Rick

New unemployment figures for Bury released today point to a jobs crisis for the borough. The figures from the Association of Greater Manchester Authorities (AGMA) reveal that there are 60% more local people claiming Job Seeker’s Allowance than a year ago.

These figures are a shocking display of how Labour’s mishandling of the economy is having a real impact on local people. There are now thousands more people out of work and claiming benefits in Bury than there were just twelve months ago. This is terrible news for them, for our borough, and for the local economy. And the figures may not tell the whole truth. When people stop spending their redundancy pay and start signing on, or come back to Job Seekers Allowance from other benefits, the true scale of the problem could be much worse.

There is particularly bad news for the long term unemployed and for jobless young people. There are nearly one third more long term unemployed claimants in Bury than a year ago, and the numbers of young people out of work in the borough has risen by 48%. Labour claim to be tackling the economic crisis. But tell that to the people of Bury desperately struggling to get out of long term unemployment, and tell that to the young people leaving college and joining the dole queues.

Job Centres in Bury have reported steep falls in vacancies. There are 66% fewer vacancies in Bury’s job centres compared to just a month ago. These figures are the worst for any borough in Greater Manchester, and reveal the level of this crisis. The Labour government are doing nothing effective to tackle it. Their efforts so far have been hugely expensive and yet there are still fewer jobs and more people looking for them. Gordon Brown is off trying to save the world, but people in Bury need jobs now, and there aren’t any. The government are letting the people of Bury down.

Rick

I was not at all surprised to read the findings of the Joseph Rowntree Report into government databasestoday. Nor was I surprised that the government rubbished it. But I was surprised at the sheer scale of surveillance, record-keeping and data-hording that the report exposed.

Thousands of databases, costing billions of pounds, keeping records on millions of us, often without our consent or even our knowledge. I won’t rattle off the statistics in the report, because you can click to read them yourself. But yet again the government are exposed as controlling, secretive and in denial about the incredible amounts of sensitive personal data they are keeping on ever greater numbers of us.

It’s morally suspect and legally wrong, and the Liberal Democrats are the only party serious about doing something about it. The government claim to be acting in our best interests, but there is simply no just reason to keep DNA records of innocent people, fingerprints of those guilty of no crime, and the personal details of millions forever just because they have used government services. It just isn’t right.

Rick

My fingers are no longer yellow, which is a relief.

Yesterday’s graffiti clean-up resulted in the chemicals reacting with my gloves and turning my digits the colour of daffodils. I have sacrificed much to my party over recent years, including any semblance of a normal personal life. I draw the line at dyeing myself yellow. But thankfully, my skin has returned to its traditional pallid and uninteresting state. And, I suspect, the walls I cleaned have been returned to their graffiti-ridden state. It’s been 24 hours after all. 

Not much earth-shattering to report from the ward today. The daily bloggings of a suburban councillor do get a tad difficult to maintain sometimes when there’s not much going on.

It’s at these lean times that I try to to generate some case work myself. And so the other day I reported that the grass verge on my street had become a little unkempt. The truth is that it’s so overgrown that an entire race descended from Sir David Attenborough now lives in it, and the whole thing needs to be chopped back.

So I told the Council this, and today I received a response, by email. The response I got missed my point entirely, because someone had misinterpreted my original request, thought I was referring to somewhere else altogether, and set completely the wrong bloke onto it. I admire the effort that had obviously gone into the attempted solution to my problem. It was a fairly length email exchange involving not only officers of the Council but also of the Forestry Commission. Alas, they were all chasing a phantom problem, and so I had to inform them that, whilst I appreciated their obvious efforts they had been, I regret to say, pointless. And my doorstep jungle remains.

Not content with failing to solve a problem out of my own front window, I have now waded head first into one outside the front door of a colleague. It seems that Branksome Avenue in my ward (home to, amongst others, my colleague and Holyrood Councillor Wilf Davison) was dug up for street light replacement some time ago. It was, in fact, during the Christmas holidays, and the diggers were probably on quadruple time. Unfortunately it has remained dug up ever since, meaning that nobody can park there and the steet is looking like a sanitised version of a WWI battlefield. I wasn’t tipped off by Cllr Davison, but by a neighbour of his, who has become exasperated at Council inaction. When she told me this I immediately felt overwhelming empathy, since I see more of Council inaction than I do of my own mother. And so I have taken it upon myself to solve the problem. I will keep her (because she’s interested) and you (because I need something to write) updated.

Rick  

This morning I joined Bury South’s MP Ivan Lewis, my fellow St Mary’s Councillor Donal O’Hanlon, and about ten local residents in a graffiti clean up around Prestwich Clough. And let me say this - if we want to stop the problem of graffiti in one instant hit, all we have to do is make the culprits try and clean up the stuff they’ve daubed onto brickwork, because it’s incredibly hard work!

We were using the graffiti kits which are available free to local residents and businesses. The kits contain gloves, cloths, scourers, and three different levels of cleaning solution. The first level is good for metal signs, the second level for stone surfaces, and the third level will simultaneously work on brickwork and burn through the casing on nuclear warheads. Unfortunately even this super strength stuff, which mysteriously turned my fingers yellow and the fingers of Ivan Lewis blue, won’t shift the graffiti from brickwork without hours and hours of hard scrubbing. I now have biceps stronger than titanium.

It was really heartening to see quite a number of residents out to help us. Even the ones who didn’t fancy ruining their elbows scrubbing graffiti chipped in with litter picking. The fact that it was organised at all shows great community spirit, and seeing passers-by stop and join in was even better.

The mood was soured slightly by five or six passing young people who took pleasure in throwing litter our way, smirking, and walking off despite our calls for them to pick it up. This type of thing is the most infuriating anti-social behaviour I come across. But, whilst I could have spent my time contemplating quite how utterly thoughtless and irresponsible their actions were, and how we manage to live in a country where that kind of attitude is allowed to develop and that kind of behaviour allowed to go unpunished, it did actually make the time go that little bit quicker as I imagined ever more exquisitely painful forms of retribution for each and every one of the little hooligans.

But before long all that was forgotten, and we made quite a team tackling the graffiti. Unfortunately, I have taken three things away from the morning, and two of them are negative. First the good one - that the people of Prestwich have shown that we can come together, people from different streets, different wards, different political parties, and do something good in our own time for the community. It’s great.

But it barely scrathes the surface. There was probably 20 man hours put into graffiti cleaning today, and we probably only touched 10% of the graffiti, and completely removed even less than that. It’s a huge job, and of course removing it doesn’t prevent it re-appearing.

And, of course, that we are forced to congratulate ourselves for nibbling away at the edges of the problem is an indictment of the Council’s continuing action. That they can sit at the Town Hall content to see Council Tax payers using third-rate “graffiti kits” to clean up mess on public property is shameful. The Council have the manpower, equipment and resources to do in a few hours what it would take volunteers weeks to do. The only thing they lack is the will. It’s time that changed. We need to show the vandals that they can’t win. We need to show them that if they daub graffiti, it will be removed straight way. We need to show them there’s no point, because we care about Prestwich. Ten people really did show that today, and I know hundreds of others think it too. It’s about time the Council recognised that, and did what we pay them to do.

Rick

Despite not being fully recovered from the last one, I appear to have been struck down by some kind of horrific lurgy again today, and feel once more like I’ve been overcome by angry germs. Still, life goes on, even if it is interspersed with more moaning and groaning than normal.

This weekend is of course the great St Mary’s Graffiti Community Clean Up Day, on Sunday. We are meeting at 10.30 for an 11.00 start. What better way to tell your Mum you love her on Mother’s Day than by whisking her off on a magical mystery tour round some of Prestwich’s worst graffiti hot-spots, and then telling her to help you clean it up?

I know the natural first response when hearing about the graffiti clean up day is to bang your head repeatedly on the ground whilst murmuring “What do I pay my Council Tax for?” over and over again. I’m not quite sure how we can square the circle of increasing Council Tax bills and the utterly shoddy service that the Council provides in removing graffiti. But still, let’s gloss over that for the time being and concentrate on the fact that this will be a good time for the community to come together and do some good work for Prestwich.

If you want to help out, just give me a call or email and I’ll let you know more details.

Rick

Roll up, roll up, it’s a meeting of the Prestwich Local Area Partnership next week. And this time it’s well worth attending, with three big items on the agenda: The Prestwich Festival, the summer’s Oasis concerts, and the latest plans to regenerate the town centre.

The LAP meeting is on Thursday March 26 at Sedgley Park Primary School in Prestwich (Kings Road / Bishops Road), starting at 6.30pm.

Prestwich Festival co-ordinator David Curtis will outline plans for the five-week festival, which runs from May 17 to June 21. You can find out how to take part and help out.

There’ll also be news on the rock band Oasis, who are playing Heaton Park on June 4, 6 and 7. Concert officials and promoters will be at the LAP to detail arrangements for the shows and plans to minimise disruption to residents.

For the first time since 1993, Oasis won’t be topping the bill though. That honour goes to developers Hollins Murray Group, who will unveil their proposals to redevelop the Longfield shopping centre. These have been drawn up in direct response to residents’ comments on their original vision. The plans will be on display in Prestwich Library on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday (March 24 to 26).

These are three important issues for Prestwich, and this is your chance to find out more and have your say. So come on down - the meeting starts from 6.30.

Rick

The Manchester rock band “Oasis” will be performing in Heaton Park on Thursday 4th, Saturday 6th and Sunday 7th June 2009 in probably the largest events the park has seen since the visit of Pope John Paul II in 1982, or possibly since I took a rowing boat out onto the lake in 2005. 

Local residents are understandably very concerned about the impact of the concert on our local area. Your local councillors have already been involved in advanced planning for the event, which will look at all the local issues - buses, traffic, schools, noise, crime, litter etc. We want the events to be a success, but Prestwich people need to live with it too! I’m proud that Oasis are coming to Prestwich, and we’re all working hard to make sure that nothing untoward happens.

Manchester City Council (who own Heaton Park) are writing to residents who live near the park. As well as that, representatives of the concert organisers are coming to Prestwich Local Area Partnership shortly (see above), and there are two “surgeries” for people to find out more about arrangements for the concerts. 

Tuesday, 5th May from15:00-19:00hrs at Heaton Park Bowls Complex (St Margaret’s Rd entrance)

Wednesday, 6th May from 15:00-19:00hrs at Parkside Training Centre (Sheepfoot Lane)

So if you wanst to find out more, now you can!

Rick

I know I’m turning up fashionably late for the party by talking about student fees today rather than yesterday, but it’s about time I was fashionable at something, and let’s rejoice in the fact that I turned up at all…

So some universities want the government to consider raising tuition fees to up to £7,000 per year. On top of a student loan to live and eat for three years, which I am (probably very conservatively) going to say is £3,000 per year, that means they are advocated students on three year courses leaving with debts of £30,000.

That’s twice the amount needed for a 10% deposit on the average house.

It’s a ludicrous idea, and a clear sign, if one were needed, about where on a university’s priority list undergraduate students come. Somewhere near the bottom, just below the colour of the wallpaper in the staff canteen, by the looks of it. If there was a course on how to scare poor students, the universities could charge a fortune to teach it, because they’re clearly the experts.

I was lucky. I was only charged £1,000 per year for tuition, plus my loan. I didn’t go crazy, I lived in an acceptable hovel rather than anywhere truly awful or remotely luxurious, and I had a part time job. So I graduated with about £12,000 of debt. And it’s paid back, with interest, as part of the PAYE system. If I lose my job or earn less than £15k a year, the government don’t send the bailiffs round, and the payments stop (although the interest doesn’t).

People a few years older than me were luckier still. With grants and no fees, they graduated debt free. But of course in those days there weren’t very many universities, and not that many people went to them.

Nowadays, with a target of 50% of people going to university (being missed but four fifths achieved), giving grants to every student and paying for them all to be taught would cost a fortune. And so we don’t.

And that’s the problem of course. Today’s students have to pay to realise the dream of sending half of them to higher education. And they have to pay an ever increasing amount.

The universities claim that charging these fees and collecting them from wages afterwards won’t deter young people from poorer backgrounds from going to university. But they’re completely out of their mind, and so is the government if it believes them. Of course it will deter people.

And on top of that, those students supported by their parents, who have to take out no loan and who have their fees paid for them, will earn more than their poorer counterparts for years afterwards because they have no debt to pay off. The poor ones will be paying hundreds a month in loan and interest for decades after graduation. It’s grossly unfair.

This debate tends to polarise people. Students are pictured with their pints of Stella moaning about how hard things are. And old white men in suits sit in their luxurious university offices claiming that they’re poor. But it’s a complex debate with many issues:

Is spending three years living away from home, taught for a handful of hours a week, the best way to get a degree? Or should we strive to make courses shorter, closer to home, and thus cheaper?

Is 50% participation, with fees attached, a better target to aim for than less participation, 100% access and lower fees?

Does mass participation change the role of a university to that of a school for 18-21 year olds? Is that OK?

Should we keep things as they are but pay more through general taxation?

These are simple questions and I don’t have the answers to them. But whilst they remain unanswered, poor students suffer. We need a sensible debate on higher education funding now, before these plans get any further. We risk deterring a generation of able but poor students from achieving their potential if we don’t.

Good news for road safety in the area, but bad news for people who like to treat Hilton Lane like the Indianapolis Motor Speedway – work has begun on some traffic islands.

These will achieve two things. First, they’ll make crossing Hilton Lane less risky than walking blindfolded into a tiger enclosure wearing a suit of beef. And second, they’ll slow the traffic down, thus making the entire area seem more like a suburban highway and less like the Monaco Grand Prix. Both of these things are, in my view, good things.

Unfortunately it does mean a few roadworks for a few days whilst the islands are built. And then almost certainly months of frustration after the bollards are covered in graffiti which is then never cleaned by a Council content to sit on its thumb. But, let’s concentrate on the positives for road safety and rejoice in these new traffic islands.

Rick

A proportion of the morning has been spent chasing up the Council’s ever-hassled (by me) Environmental Services department, once again over the St Ann’s Road garden situation, which rumbles on and on and on and on like one of those American freight trains I have seen in films.

To recap briefly, residents have enjoyed gardens backing on to Prestwich Clough for years. The gardens are actually owned by the Council but were given over during the War to grow vegetables. After long-running sagas like this one, I can’t help but feel that several have found jobs at the Town Hall in the years since.

Successive instances of spirit-crushing incompetence by the Council and its predecessor organisations over the decades regarding these tenancy arrangements now means there’s a hotch-potch of arrangements for the residents. The Council tried to resolve this last year with its usual sledgehammer tact by asking everyone to sign agreements with massive rent increases and punitive new terms.

Unluckily for the Council, they didn’t reckon on a couple of smart residents unwilling to be forced into this (or, it turns out, just about anything). The residents contacted me, and so we’ve been trying to get a better deal for them ever since.

So far we’ve succeeded in stalling the introduction of the new contracts, but not got much further. The Council have succeeded in turning so many local people against them that there’s now a residents committee, a “Dig for Victory” campaign, and lots of negative press coverage.

And now after yet another confusing letter was sent to some but not all of the residents, and after the Land Registry were sent erroneous information by the Council on this issue, we are asking for clarity again.

I think this problem demonstrates the difficulties of trying to run a huge organisation (the Council) which deals with a huge amount of little things which matter a lot to large numbers of people. These gardens are infinitesimally small fry to a department which has to manage hundreds of miles of roads, dozens of parks, empty the bins and bury the dead. But they are massively important to the few residents who actually want to enjoy their gardens.

Unfortunately, the Council’s response is not to meet this difficulty and beat it, but to wade around in the mire for months making it ever harder for the left hand to know what the right hand is doing. I get the impression that this problem could be resolved very quickly if one person was given the job of sorting it out, and held responsible for doing so. We’re talking about a few hundred quid here. It’s not going to break the Council’s bank either way. So write to the residents, find out what they want, talk to them to see if their wishes can be accommodated, if they can’t then explain why not, and get it done.

What seems to be happening is that the myriad officers, departments and agendas that this thing brings together (financial, legal, environmental) means that there are lots of fingers in the pie, and nobody’s taking responsibility for it. Which is very frustrating for me and much more frustrating for the residents continually knocked back and delayed by Council confusion.

These little things matter and, like the low level graffiti in Prestwich which this same department is also doing nothing about, if they were quickly and sensibly solved the Council would win a lot of friends and a lot of respect without spending much money at all.

Rick

The graffiti situation in Prestwich shows no signs of getting any better. Whilst the Council continue to dither and do nothing, despite the howls of protest from just about everyone who cares about the area, local vandals are taking advantage of the easy pickings by tagging every surface they can see.

So this weekend there’s going to be a community graffiti clean up. It’s on Sunday morning, meeting at 10.30 for an 11am start. We’ll be cleaning the graffiti for a couple of hours before going to the Church Inn for a well-earned lunch.

It’s a fairly sad state of affairs that the Council are so inept at doing what local people want that we’ve had ot take matters into our own hands. But still, a sign of the good community spirit locally that people can come together to make Prestwich better despite the authorities making it quite clear that they couldn’t care less.

If you’d like details of where we’re meeting and how you can get involved, please call or email me. It’d be great to see lots of people there chipping in to clean up Prestwich.

Rick

Holy Cross College in Bury are holding a fundraining event this week. The event is an ‘East meets West’ charity fashion show, aiming to bring cultures together and to raise money for the NSPCC (the children’s charity).

Other entertainment will include live music and there will also be food available. Tickets are £5 for adults and £3 for children. The event will be held at Bethesda Church on Parkhills Road, not far from the college.

So, if you’re free on Thursday and want to have an interesting evening whilst raising money for a good cause, head down to the fashion show!

Rick

This weekend I have been away from Prestwich, visiting some friends of our’s in Newcastle. One of the two of them (the wife, unsurprisingly) is pregnant. 

As my friends and I get older, we embark on various life events which I have hitherto not experienced at close quarters. First it was weddings, and now more and more of us are getting involved with babies. It bothers me that we’re getting older, obviously. But it bothers me more that it’s not only legal but completely acceptable for people like us, grinning buffoons tumbling through life’s challenges without the foggiest idea how to overcome many of them, to bring babies into the world.

I keep thinking that maybe those amongst us who are married and now parents have come across the answer to it all. They must surely have had their moment of enlightenment, and now as a result they’re now confident enough in their comprehension of the madness of the world to raise a child. But when I ask them, they haven’t. They’re as clueless as I am, but with a baby to look after and fool into thinking they know it all. I don’t know if this is wonderfully comforting or crazily alarming. I do know that if the truth ever came out and kids found out that adults are pretty much clueless, there’d be anarchy in schools. God bles the teachers for keeping that one under wraps.

My own wedding is on the cards now of course, and I am hurtling towards it regardless of everything. But babies are still some way off. In the meatime I just watch with awe as people I know not only create life themselves, but then store it inside them for nine months and then look after it constantly thereafter, with little or nothing going wrong. I panic if the cat’s late coming home. How I’d cope if Tam had a foetus wriggling inside her is anyone’s guess. Although, on the bright side, whilst she’s pregnant at least she can’t leave it somewhere and forget where she put it.

Watching friends with babies is a great learning experience. All of a sudden I know more about placentas and colic than I ever thought I could. And it’s great. It almost makes me want to have one myself. Almost.

So far we have one baby amongst our friends, which I have stared at slack-jawed with wonder every time I’ve been near it since it was born. There’s another one I haven’t met yet, and a couple of pregnancies, and now my North-eastern friend is having one too. She is apparently not allowed to eat a lot of things, which explained the ludicrous amount of excitement generated when it turned out that the goat’s cheese at dinner was pasteurised and thus edible. I don’t quite understand the science behind it, since I’m pretty sure that pre about 1975 mums-to-be could smoke and drink and eat anything they wanted, and there were no three-headed babies born anywhere. But still, such laws are adhered to with fervour these days, and I don’t envy expectant mothers one bit. Yet another reason I am glad that God blessed me biologically by neglecting to give me a womb.

Aside from pondering pregnancies, I visited an art gallery whilst I was up in Newcastle, and took in a Yoko Ono retrospective. Now, call me a Philistine if you want, but frankly, I reckon she wouldn’t be half as lauded as she is if she’d have married Ringo. 100 black umbrellas in a pile? Give me a break… Genuinely, I came up with a better idea in five minutes in the coffee shop afterwards. I’m sure there’s a back story to it, but I’ve never got conceptual art, and I don’t think I ever will.

Anyway, that was the weekend.

The week ahead sees a couple of meetings amidst the casework and who-knows-what which will come up as the week progresses. On Tuesday night it’s the Rainsough Tenants and Residents Association, and on Thursday it’s the Developing Communities sub-group of Prestwich Local Area Partnership. Both promise to be interesting meetings, and I’m looking forward to them. The Rainsough one is at 7pm in the Scout Hut, and Thursday night it’s 5pm at the Methodist Church. So pop along if you want.

Rick 

Local residents who read the letters page of the Prestwich and Whitefield Guide last week (i.e. local Councillors, people who want to be local Councillors, people who wrote that week and were checking to see if their letter had been published, and people sat in waiting rooms) will have seen the following letter which I realise I am now giving extra publicity to:

“CONGRATULATIONS to our MP, Ivan Lewis, on his successful campaign to ensure Prestwich has an annual festival beginning this year (Guide, February 20).

Ivan and the Prestwich Renewal Commission he established proposed that this should happen as part of a series of confidence-building measures in advance of the full scale redevelopment planned for Prestwich village centre.

I trust Cllr D’Albert and his colleagues will have the good grace not to claim this as a Lib Dem initiative. “Vic thanks Ivan” would make a great headline in the next Lib Dem Focus leaflet! I won’t hold my breath.

Adrian Palmer”

Here is my response:

“CONGRATULATIONS to local Labour activist, Adrian Palmer, on his successful campaign to ensure that politicians look like they’re squabbling around for credit for the Prestwich Festival like ducks scrapping for bread (Guide, March 12).

Adrian and the Prestwich Renewal Commission he supports did propose the festival should happen, but so did the LAP-produced Prestwich Area Plan, and so did lots of other people and groups. Nobody should take sole credit for the idea, because it’s hardly the most original thing anyone’s ever said, and if Adrian, Ivan Lewis, Vic D’Albert, me or anyone else thinks that they’re the first person to think of a local festival as a way to spruce up an area, they’re wrong.

I trust Mr Palmer and his colleagues will have the good grace not claim this as a Labour initiative either. “Politicians don’t all act like babies” would make a great headline just about anywhere! I won’t hold my breath.

Richard Baum”

I think Adrian Palmer’s letter is idiotic. Why party politicise what should be a great community event? Nowhere have I ever seen it called the “Lib Dem Prestwich Festival,” nor do I ever want it to be seen as such. We will write about it in Focus, of course we will – it’s a community newsletter talking about the things local Councillors have been involved in. The Prestwich Festival is now actually happening. It’s a Local Area Partnership-led series of events, and we lead the LAP. But we won’t claim undue credit for thinking of the idea or for running it, because it’s a team effort. We’re doing our jobs as community leaders and I welcome anyone who wants to help out, of whatever political persuasion. Sneering letters don’t do that though, and people would serve Prestwich better by offering to help make the idea a reality rather than fighting over whose idea it was in the first place.

Rick

Last night was a meeting of the Council’s Resource and Performance Scrutiny Commission. I am the Lib Dem spokespweson on this group, which is a cross-party collection of Councillors meeting half a dozen (or so) times a year to scrutinise the work of the Council’s Executive in their management of Council performance and finance.

The major issue of the evening was a review of Local Area Partnerships (LAPs). I have written more about this below.

Aside from LAPs, there was a presentation on the Council’s Comprehensive Performance Assessment action plan. This was mainly fine, and there has been good progress made in implementing some of the recommendations highlighted when the Council was inspected last year.

The Director of Finance talked about the Council’s asset management strategy, which was also fine and outlines how we’re going to manage public buildings in the future.

And there was good news at the end of the meeting - There are some potential revenue savings that the Council can make! Unfortunately it’s not from making services more efficient or from getting more money from the government. No, these savings arise from a new capital accounting fudge which we can now exploit! The savings generated are good news, but really, when you think about it, what a ridiculous world we live in where a change in book-keeping regulations means all of a sudden the Council is richer than it was five minutes ago.

Crazy stuff. The meeting was over at 8.45, just in time for me to watch the second half of City v Alalborg and see us miss more chances than I am entirely comfortable with.

Rick

The major item at last night’s scrutiny meeting was a review of Local Area Partnerships (LAPs).

Anyone who has ever sat through a LAP meeting will know that not all is well in the world of LAPs. They have a tendency to make me want to ram my head repeatedly against a hard surface, and although things are improving and we’re finding our way a couple of years after they were formed, there are still glaring problems. For instance, there’s sometimes a serious lack of engagement with “partners” who have their own agendas and don’t seem to care about what local people want. There’s also a complete lack of power or money devolved to a neighbourhood level to make decisions on local services. And there’s no formality to the structure of LAPs or a way into existing Council desicion making structures.

Good things happen at LAPs, like the recent Prestwich Regeneration consultation. But often it’s down to luck rather than judgement, and without more support and more powers it may well remain that way.

Last night’s review was presented by the Conservative Deputy Leader of the Council, who is responsible for Local Area Partnerships. Although the issues we raised were taken on board, I thought there was a lack of committment to addressing them. We pleaded for more representation from Council officers with responsibility for core services like Highways, but I think our please fell on deaf ears. Apparently to have a Highways officer at meetings would be a “waste of time,” despite lots of members of the public wanting answers to questions on topics such an officer could answer.

Partnership working is fine, when it works. But often times it really doesn’t, and I was a bit disturbed last night at the assertion by the Deputy Leader, which seemed to be generally accepted, that the Council is “an equal partner” to everyone else such as the Police, Housing Associations, Schools etc. I didn’t say anything at the time, but I regretted it afterwards because even if everyone else agrees with that, I don’t. We Councillors the only people elected to anything by anyone and so we should be empowered to lead. We should respect our partners, sure, but we should also use our democratic mandate to move things along when they’re stalled, and to remind partners that their duty is to serve the public who have made their views known through elections.

I was also a bit disturbed that the success of LAPs might be being over-blown to make the Council look good. The Deputy Leader said last night, in response to a question we raised, that each of the LAPs have produced annual reports in the last two years. I’ve never seen Prestwich’s, for last year or this, and when we challenged the Deputy Leader about the process and whether the writing of these reports included anyone like Councillors, she said that it was written by the Chief Executive’s Department and that “Councillors are part of the Chief Executive’s Department.” Which is probably the biggest load of rubbish I’ve ever heard. The Chief Executive’s Department is a Council Department staffed by officers of the Council. Councillors are elected to represent the people of Bury, and we should have our say on the LAP reports, as should everyone else.

It’s a shame that there isn’t more openness to reforming LAPs and giving them real power and influence. We could make a big difference at local and neighbourhood level if we were entrusted to do so. Sadly, we’re not.

Rick

Exciting plans are afoot for Heaton Park, all of which will be coming up for decision in the next few months.

I’d like to know what you think, and what your concerns are, so that I can feed in your views to the process.

Heaton Park is run by Manchester City Council, so it will be them making any decisions, but we can still let our views be known.

Heaton Hall
Manchester City Council embarked on a major project to restore Heaton Park in 1996 when the Council approved the Regeneration Strategy for Heaton Park. A bid to fund the third phase of this project, the restoration of Heaton Hall, was submitted to the Heritage Lottery Fund and Manchester CC is waiting to hear on the outcome of this bid.
If succesfull the project would:
-Conserve and repair the external fabric of the whole building;
-conserve the historic interiors and contents of the central core and east wing of the Hall;
-undertake modest improvements to the interior of the derelict west wing to allow public access with associated interpretation;
-provide improved visitor facilities such as reception, shop and accessible toilets;
-provide a more appealing platform to attract funding to develop the interior of the west wing and the Orangery.

It would be estimated that the Hall would close in 2010 and reopen in 2013.

Creation of a new Sports Zone, St Margaret’s Gate Entrance

Plans are coming to Manchester Council’s Planning Committee before the summer for a “Sports Zone” near to the St Margaret’s Entrance of the Park. This would build on the existing Bowling Greens (created for the Commonwealth Games).

The proposed Sports Zone would include:
· 5-a-side pitches
· 7-a-side pitch
- Tennis Courts
· Spectator area
· Climbing wall
· Single storey pavilion comprising changing rooms, meeting rooms and bar
· Car parking

It would be run by a private company (ie there would be a charge for using the facilities normally, however it is proposed that it is made available for community use at non-peak times with free access for under 16 year olds. We’re also assured that there will be no activity after 9.00pm at night.

The project is still at the planning stage and a public consultation exercise will take place in the Farm Centre, Heaton Park within the next 2 months following which the Planning Application will be submitted. (I will let people know when I have a date for this.)

What do you think?
Please let me know what you think about these plans. There are clearly some good points, like an increase in local sports facilities; things for young people to do; community use and free for under 16 year olds
But people might worry about traffic issues, particularly on the bottom end of St Margarets Road; parking issues (St Margarets Road & Close etc); using a previously open access part of the park for new activities.

Let me know what yout hink.

Rick

It’s a shame that two of Lib Dem Shadow Home Secretary Chris Huhne’s campaigns that I think are very worthwhile have been more or less completely ignored by the media this week. His pointing out that the government’s DNA database contains some utterly outrageous entries (including the DNA record of a baby) barely got noticed. And the Freedom Bill he launched last week also barely raised a murmur anywhere outside of the Lib Dem blogging world.

Both of these causes are well worth shouting about, but sadly nobody seems to want to shout about them, least of all newspaper editors. Maybe in a couple of years when they’re carted off for not carrying their mandatory ID card and have their DNA permanently stored on some giant government database somewhere because of it they might care about them more. But right now it’s clear what’s important. And what’s important is whether Coronation Street gets rebuilt brick by brick somewhere else.

It’s doubly bad that these two initiatives have been ignored, because today Mr Huhne has been talking about police officers, and I have reservations about what he’s been saying, whilst the media have lapped it up!

The party has discovered, through the Freedom of Information Act, that 1,063 police officers have received criminal convictions. 77 have convictions for violent offences, and 96 for dishonesty.

We’ve released the figures, and they’ve been all over the news today.

The point of our making lots about these figures is, I imagine, to make the point that police forces aren’t sacking people with criminal convictions when they should be doing. But there are a few problems with this approach.

Mr Huhne says that “Hiring and firing must ultimately be the responsibility of the Chief Officer.” I agree with him. The Chief Officers know a lot more about the individual cases than we do. But if we want to put power in the hands of local top cops, we shouldn’t then complain when they exercise that power.
Are we not contradicting our desire for local decision making by obtaining the results of precisely these local Chief Officer decisions and then releasing them to the media with lots of attached criticism?

Mr Huhne calls for Home Office guidance on the issue. Whilst we could legitimately call for the issuing of this guidance, and whilst it’s the fault of the government that it doesn’t currently exist, there’s no calls for it from the police in our press release. And how does a call for centrally issued guidance sit comfortably alongside calls for Chief Officer decision making and local accountability?

Many’s the time I sit on the Licensing Panel at the town hall being asked to follow Whitehall “guidance” on an issue, when I think that my local knowledge and common sense would do a better job. We pay Chief Constables a lot of money, let them take the decisions they want to take, and stand and fall by them. If they’re the wrong decisions, there are local Police Authorities to sort out the mess. And if we don’t trust them to do that, why have them?

Aside from central / local accountability, Mr Huhne also talks about wanting to get rid of criminal officers to avoid bringing the “vast majority of law abiding and diligent officers into disrepute.” Well, I think we’ve succeeded in doing the exact opposite today by not predicting that the release of figures like this would have the media making the police look incompetent and criminal, and make us look like we’re criticising the police unjustly.

Of the 1,063 with convictions, says our press release, only 45 have been dismissed for violence in the last 5 years, only 37 for dishonesty, and 210 for other things. That’s the main plank of our criticism. 1,063 sounds a lot (it must be a lot, there’s a comma in it!), and 45 and 37 don’t sound very many at all. Gosh, what a criminal rabble the police must be…

But these numbers are misleading. The 1,063 officers with convictions represents significantly less than 1% of the total of around 150,000 police officers in the UK. The 173 with violent or dishonest convictions represents around 0.1%, or one in a thousand police officers. Despite not wanting to bring the vast majority of the police into disrepute, the 99% of law abiding, diligent officers left will have to spend time justifying these figures today, and will have to deal with another blow to community / police relations when someone seizes on these figures to make the point that the police are riddled with criminals.

I feel this whole release of information misses the point we should be making. Mr Huhne says that the police should “get tough on bad apples.” They should, but there are plenty of bad apple police officers who’ve never committed a crime in their lives – they’re just rubbish at being a police officer. It’s a shame we haven’t called for those bad apples to be got tough on! And there are, I imagine, lots of police officers convicted of crimes who are absolutely excellent at their job. That’s probably why they haven’t been sacked.

There shouldn’t be police officers with criminal tendencies. Of course there shouldn’t. But not every conviction is the same as the next, and not every police officer with a conviction becomes automatically unsuited to his job. Surely we want the Police to police a fair society, and not one where politicians come out with generalisations which suggest blanket punishments for disparate offenders.

We are right to call for local decision making powers, and probably right to call for better help centrally, if this is what the police want too. But we’re wrong to make a song and dance of a tiny percentage of police officers who have benefitted from this local decision making, especially when I think we’re doing it just to make the police (and therefore the government) look bad. We’d have better served the police, and probably our own consciences, to have sought this change quietly and not risked making the whole national police force out to be dotted with thieves and thugs.

Rick

I have been occupied with a variety of things this morning, none of which are hugely exciting, but all of which combine to fill up this blog. Which is handy.

Firstly, I have spent some time preparing for tomorrow’s meeting of the Resource and Performance Scrutiny commission. The most interesting part of the agenda relates to Local Area Partnerships, a review of which will be discussed tomorrow. The report is one of the most frustrating I’ve ever read (and that’s saying something, given that most Council reports make my eyes bleed). Its relentlessly cheery tone is at odds with some of the real and obvious problems that LAPs face such as very little real engagement with partners, and even less money. And the report is completely lacking in quite a lot of detail. So there’ll be some digging to do tomorrow night, and probably a moan about the results of that digging on here on Friday.

I have also heard some news this morning on the ongoing saga of the St Ann’s Road garden tenancies. This was already a decades old dispute when it reared its head least year, so unsurprisingly it’s not been resolved quickly. I heard today though that some new concessions from the council have been presented to the residents, so we’ll see what they think about that.

This evening I am meeting the Prestwich Area Manager to talk about the Local Community Plan. There have been some good achievements so far and it’s important to keep the pressure on and make sure that these aren’t isolated successes.

Rick

Funerals in my family are odd occasions. I had never been to one until a few years back, but now as the generation two above me slowly fades away I seem to be going to more and more. And today I had another, as we said goodbye to a dear old uncle who I really should’ve seen more often in life.

They’re odd because the family never seems to see each other outside of them, and certainly never dabbles in anything God related on a mass scale like it does when someone dies. All of a sudden these people who we take for granted and barely see, become the people we cling to for dear life because they’re just about the only people in the world who know as much about the dead guy as you do. There’s nothing like a disaster to bring communities together, and there’s nothing like a death to bring families together. Unfortunately, once the disaster is over or the mourning calmed, we go back to normal. I wish I had the fortitude to stop it, but sadly life too easily gets in the way.

Anyway, because we’re Jewish the funerals take place very quickly after the death. Biblical tradition dictates that they should take place by the next day, if possible, which is no mean feat of administration, not to mention grave digging.

I suppose it’s no way to run a business, not knowing from one day to the next how many clients you’re going to have. But I imagine there’s little other way to run a Jewish undertakers, who I imagine can sometimes have spikes in demand. The need for speed at my family’s funerals has been so great in the past, in fact, that at my Grandma’s a few years back the hearse sped so manically towards the cemetery that half the mourners lost their way. On that particular day there was obviously a glut of burials on because there certainly was less of a stately procession and more the flavour of a grand prix.

Today was slightly different, but equally sad and another reminder (as if the tick-tick-ticking of time’s unceasing clock in my head wasn’t reminder enough) that the oldest generation is going and will soon be replaced with the ones that were my age when I was born. We really have to do good with our lives to make them proud. Really, really we do.

All of which tinkering about in cemeteries meant that there was little in the way of Council action from me today. But there might be tomorrow, and here’s hoping there are no more funerals. Although, as a Jewish guy forced to live on the edge with these types of things, I really never can tell…

Rick

My voice has deserted me. After coughing and spluttering my way through the last seven days, my vocal chords have finally had enough, packed their bags and shuffled off somewhere. I am left squawking. Which is most amusing to everyone in my life except me. I can no longer pretend to be truly ill though, having been caught red handed on the Metrolink into town on Saturday night by a fellow Councillor. My cover is blown.

It was interesting to read in the news today that the Campaign to Protect Rural England (CPRE) has commissioned a report which recommends more fines and rewards as a way to reduce litter. Prestwich, as even casual observers will note, hardly counts as “rural,” but the problem of litter is a hot potato in our area as much as anywhere else. And last week’s news that the Council’s litter patrols had issued a grand total of zero fines to offenders in the last quarter wouldn’t please the CPRE one bit.

The report calls for simple new measures which have been effective elsewhere and could be effective here. Bottle deposits, for instance, which I remember fondly from my childhood but which seem to have disappeared now. I used to get hugely excited at the prospect of getting to drink my Tizer and then get 10p for taking the empty bottle back!

Bill Bryson, the author, is behind the CPRE’s campaign. He is calling for more consistency and joined up thinking in litter policy across the country. And I’d like to echo his views and call for more joined up thinking locally as well. It’s no good the Council increasing litter patrols on the one hand, but removing bins on the other. Yet that’s exactly what they’ve done in Prestwich.

But, as the report points out, so much to do with litter is wider than just litter itself. It’s about civic pride, and once again I think the Council could re-prioritise or think in a more joined up way to make things better. A lot of people talk about “broken window syndrome,” and the fact that if an area looks bad and uncared for, it will encourage people who live there to take less care of it and thus the situation will get worse. In Prestwich, whilst litterbugs need to be stopped from littering with fines and punishments, an equal deterrent might be for us all to take a bit more care over the wider environment. That means all being conscious of our community responsibilities – from people not parking illegally in Prestwich, to dog walkers cleaning up after their pets, to the Council getting off its backside and cleaning up the graffiti which is blighting the town and making it look like a war zone.

Nobody likes litter. But it’s just one part of neglecting Prestwich. I don’t drop litter, but sometimes I drive a bit too fast on the roads round here, or don’t report a blocked drain or a wonky park bench. I should, and we all should, and the Council should act to fix them. If we all did, then people would be much less likely to drop litter because the place is well cared for. And that’s needed too, as well as fines and other measures.

Rick

The Liberal Democrat Spring Conference has backed plans to give all families 20 hours of free, high quality childcare as well as allowing fathers to take up to one year of paternity leave.

The proposals include: 

• Providing 20 hours of free, good quality childcare a week from 18 months to five years old
• Ensuring all childcare workers are qualified to a minimum level
• Improving the quality of childcare by expanding the role of children’s centres as training institutions
• Providing 19 months parental leave, shared between both parents making it easier for fathers to play a fuller role

I don’t have children myself, but hope to one day. I know from the experiences of friends and colleagues that making the most of parental leave is difficult because of childcare issues. If we want a soceity that’s fair and allows for both parents to take an active role in bringing up children from the very beginning, whilst letting people keep jobs and have access to quality childcare, we need reforms like these now.

Rick
 

This weekend it’s been the Lib Dem spring conference, and it’s given the party the chance to re-affirm and establish policies in lots of important areas. One of the things that most attracted me to the party when I joined was our opposition to tuition fees for students.

There’s no surer way to make university unappealing to poorer young people than charging a fortune to go. If we want fair access, e shouldn’t be asking poorer families to pay for a first degree. And this weekend the Lib Dem conference re-affirmed the party’s plans to scrap the fees. We also voted to extend the provision to part time students.

The proposals, which aim to make high quality education and training available to all, include:

• Scrapping tuition fees for first Higher Education degree qualifications
• Fully funding the off-the-job training costs of apprenticeships
• Improving access to Higher Education for under-represented groups
• Reforming the bursary scheme to make it available more fairly across universities

Commenting, Liberal Democrat Shadow Innovation, Universities and Skills Secretary, Stephen Williams said:

“Bright young people are potentially being put off going to university by the thought of being saddled with £10k in tuition fee debt.

“The Liberal Democrats believe that everyone deserves the chance to develop the skills and knowledge that will give them the best opportunities in life.

“That’s why we are committed to scrapping tuition fees for full and part-time students, and improving access to apprenticeships so that everyone can get the best from their education.”

Rick

The inaugural Prestwich Festival has been officially launched!

The festival, which will run from 17th May - 21st June this year, will bring thousands of people and thousands of pounds into Prestwich, showcasing everything the area has to offer, and raising lots of money for local charities in the process. It is hoped that the Festival will become an annual event, helping local businesses, clubs and societies, and making the most of Prestwich’s fantastic amenities. Staging a series of events to highlight all that is good about Prestwich is a key promise made in the Prestwich Plan, and now we are coming good on that with the first Prestwich Festival.

The Prestwich Festival 2009 will kick off with with Clough Day on 17th May. Previous Clough Days have been staggeringly successful, with a range of activities, stalls and events for all the family in the beautiful Prestwich Clough and St Mary’s Flower Garden. The Festival will end 5 weeks later with the Prestwich Carnival weekend. Last year, these two events alone brough in nearly 30,000 people to the area. This year, we are capitalising on these two established events with a series of new ones to make the Prestwich Festival season.

There are already many exciting events confirmed. Prestwich Amateur Dramatic and Operatic Society (PADOS) will be performing a special production; the Fetish For Food bistro will be holding a gourmet night; and the Cricket, Tennis and Bowling club will host a showcase day.

There will also be a series of events at local pubs, including a folk night at the Church Inn. Local arts and photographic societies will be putting on exhibitions, and dance and drama groups will be offering free trials. The Longfield Suite will have yoga and dance events, and one of the undoubted highlights will be a farmers’ market day in the Longfield Centre.

And although it’s nothing to do with the Prestwich Festival, we’re lucky that right in the middle of the planned events, Manchester’s biggest band Oasis come to town to play some gigs in Heaton Park.

Any local business, group or society is invited to suggest or host an event, which the Festival organisers can publicise and make part of the Festival itself. There are already dozens of interested parties, and this is sure to be a very exciting few weeks for the area.

Prestwich is a fantastic place, and this Festival is a great way of telling everyone just what we’ve got to offer.

There’ll be more details, confirmed events and dates as time goes on and the start date nears. In the meantime, news will appear on this site and in the local press, and local residents will receive information through the post nearer the time.

I welcome your views on any ideas you might have to make the best of the Prestwich Festival.

Rick 

The Liberal Democrats have published their Freedom Bill, detailing how the party plans to roll back the authoritarian laws passed by both Labour and Conservative governments which have undermined civil liberties.

Liberal Democrats in the House of Lords protest the restrictions on demonstrating outside Parliament during the passage of the Serious and Organised Crime Act.

The legislation is the first time a major political party has collated all of the laws which have undermined civil liberties into one Bill, so that they can be easily repealed. By axing expensive and ineffective measures that hinder and keep tabs on innocent people, the Bill will help switch efforts to catching the guilty instead.

The 20 measures contained in the draft legislation will:
- Abolish the veto in the Freedom of Information Act that allows ministers to keep information secret
- Scrap the expensive mandatory ID card scheme
- Remove all innocent people from the DNA database, except for those tried for a violent or sexual offence
- Stop councils and others snooping by restricting the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA) to serious and terrorist offences
- Regulate CCTV to protect privacy following a Royal Commission on the use of cameras

You can view the bill in detail, comment on the draft and sign up to back the campaign at http://freedom.libdems.org.uk

Rick

I am still struggling with my man flu, which has mutated into a cold. I am reluctant to call it a “common” cold, because people seem to get through so-called common colds without making half as much fuss as I am making. So this one must be uncommonly severe. Life-threatening, even.

But one piece of news has cheered me today. The Audit Commission, the people who monitor Councils, have announced the results of the latest Comprehensive Performance Assessment (CPA) of Local Authorities. And they have said that Bury Council is a 4-star Council, which means that the Council has been judged “Excellent.” Bury is one of only two councils in the whole of England to have made the leap to four stars from just two stars, where it was last year.

This is great news, and a testament to the staff of the Council who have worked very hard to improve services and get the Council to that level.

But, alas, CPA in not the panacea which I suspect the Bury Conservatives who run the Council will be claiming. In fact, CPA is being abolished as of the end of this month, to be replaced by something better. Being graded “Excellent” in a flawed process is better than being graded “Poor.” But the process is indeed flawed, and we shouldn’t get carried away.

I used to work in the Performance department of a Council (mostly before I was elected, and it wasn’t Bury’s one), so I know quite a lot about CPA. It is, as the title suggests, quite a comprehensive way of assessing services. But the way that it does so is very much to do with performance statistics, which can mean the targeting of resources to meet targets and tick boxes rather than to respond to what citizens on the street actually want. It’s a flaw which has long been evident yet never been properly corrected.

This is evident in Bury where, for instance, the Environmental Services department score very highly. The department’s staff do their job well and do indeed hit their targets. But whilst the Audit Commission might judge that there’s success, I wonder if they’d have the same view if they actually lived in Prestwich and had to deal with litter un-swept, graffiti un-cleaned, and roads un-repaired? I doubt it. These problems aren’t to do with bad staff, there to do with mis-directed money and ignored local people. And CPA doesn’t have anything to say about that.

CPA has always lacked enough emphasis on service user satisfaction, relaying on tightly-worded tri-annual surveys rather than mystery shopping or the experience of Councillors. The process has also been far too heavily weighted to national priorities at the expense of local ones, and has put adherence to government wish lists ahead of proper local scrutiny.

I wonder what the government has to say about the problems with scrutiny this year in Bury, or the incremental authoritarianism of the Council leadership? Well, it says nothing, because this part of the Council’s activities were judged in a different part of CPA, at a different time. And even then they were just one small part of a massive inspection, despite being absolutely crucial to the governance of the Borough.

These weaknesses are now most evident. For a Council to be declared “excellent” in the same week that it cuts services and raises taxes, and in the same year that it slashes staff pay, is crazy.

And the staff pay issue is again very pertinent this morning. The Council have released a special issue of their staff newsletter to congratulate everyone on the achievement. At the top of the list of high performing services are the Revenues and Benefits service, who deal with all of our Council Tax payments and the administration of benefits to the needy. They too have received a top 4 star rating. And yet a mixture of bad laws, bad government and crazy local decision making has seen many of the staff in that department lose a crushingly large proportion of their salary this year.

There is nothing about this in the congratulatory press releases being released by the Council, the Audit Commission and the government today.

Everyone is pleased that targets have been hit and the veneer of “excellent” assured. I live in Bury and love it, and I am exceptionally porud of local government and what it can do. The more Councils that can describe themselves as excellent, the better. But it would be better still if they actually were excellent!

The reality is that things are far from excellent, and that even this pretend excellence of CPA will not be maintained if staff continue to be mistreated, if local priorities continue to be ignored, and if services continue to be cut.

Rick

Well, the results are in in the Great Prestwich Litter Reduction Challenge, and rather like the Eurovision Song Contest, there is an undeserving yet oddly predictable winner.

Three months ago the Council launched a “crack down” on litter louts in Prestwich, with the promise of extra enforcement and the issuing of fixed penalty notices (FPNs) to litter louts. Now, at the end of the trial period, the Council have confirmed that a grand total of zero FPNs have been issued in Prestwich in that time. Nil, nada, nothing. Not one. Not a single FPN has been issued, despite litter complaints holding steady, and rubbish still being blown about the centre of town like a bin’s been overturned in a wind tunnel.

I find this result exceedingly disappointing, and I’ve asked the Council to let me know exactly why this has happened, as a matter of urgency. I can’t believe that in three whole months of additional patrolling (that’s patrolling in addition to what was already there!) they have managed to capture not a single litter lout! What is the point of having the staff issuing the FPNs if they can’t catch anyone? And what is the point pretending we have a deterrent when clearly it’s about as evident as the Loch Ness Monster?

I wonder (and have posed this point to the Council) whether there has been any effective targeting at all. Anyone native to Prestwich would tell you that if you stuck someone within the eye-line of the Fairfax pub on a Friday night, the smokers outside it would illegally drop enough litter to warrant dozens of FPNs. The same is true of people coming off the Metrolink station or walking through the Longfield Centre at lunchtime and depositng sandwich wrappers on the floor. I reckon I could catch half a dozen litterers in a day doing just that. Someone must be doing it, or else the litter is coming from the sky, and that’s far more worrying…

So I’m trying to get a bit more information on quite why this scheme has been so spectacularly unsuccessful, and will pass it on when I get it. In the meantime, it looks like the litterers of Prestwich will continue to get away with it. Very disappointing, and even though I don’t doubt that the Council share my disappointment, it’s about time they put more resource in so that we can actually make a difference. That clearly isn’t happening now. Deterring litter bugs will have a money saving effect in the long run, preventing future litter and curing the town of a scourge.

Rick

I have brazenly stolen an exciting new feature for the blog from my fellow Bury Council Lib Dem blogger Cllr Tim Pickstone. Now, thanks to his mastery of website coding, and my mastery of bare-faced thieving, you can catch up on all the latest Prestwich news right here on this website!

Just click on the “Prestwich News” page via the link on the left hand side, and you will see all the latest headlines from the local press, with links to their articles. And, if the mood teks you, you can play a fun game. See how many of the stories on here are cribbed from there, and how many of their stories are nicked directly from here!

Rick

The Advertiser newspaper is reporting that Bury has the worst pavements in Greater Manchester, according to a survey by the Chartered Institute of Phsyiotherapists.

The report says that 37% of pavements are in need of repair - the figure puts Bury above the national average of 22 per cent and north west average of 23 percent. It also puts third ninth worst out of 22 local authorities in the north west.

This won’t come as much of a surprise to many local people who have brought up the state of the roads and pavements as a major cause for concern.

Liberal Democrats recently proposed a massive 33% increase in the local street and pavement repair budget, but were voted down by the ruling Conservative Group on the Council.

Rick

I am off work sick today. It feels as though there’s some kind of military artillery demonstration taking place in my head. Occasionally I get these 24 hour bug things which make me generally horrendous, and today is one of those days. Last night I managed to get absolutely no sleep at all, and have just about staggered from my bed to the computer now to see whether anything’s happening in the world. It turns out that there isn’t, and so I may take my blanket downstairs and lie groaning on the sofa until Tamsin gets back.

Three people already today have diagnosed my ailment as “man flu,” but I am confident that it is a serious illness worthy of the groaning and shaking that I am doing lots of.

Rick

I noticed tonight that a Facebook group has been launched which campaigns to “Shred John Prescott’s Pension” so as not to “reward him for failure,” in much the same way as he’s campaigning against Sir Fred Goodwin’s pension.

There’s nothing more certain to attract the most feverish bandwagon-jumpers these days than a Facebook group, but this one I think misses the point and misdirects the argument in an unfortunate way.

Putting Mr Prescott aside (for the moment), there are obvious flaws in Sir Fred’s pension payments, and people are right to be annoyed. He seems to have had his annual pension boosted purely as a result of his decision to effectively take the last lifeboat of a sinking ship. Any payments accrued because of this shouldn’t have happened, and there’s an argument to be made to take them away. If there’s a legal avenue to do so, we should go down it.

But some of the punishments suggested for Sir Fred, in my opinion, go too far. They verge on rich-bashing for the sake of it whilst simultaneously missing the real injustice.

For one thing, I am uncomfortable with the idea of passing retrospective laws to take back the man’s pension. Fair enough he has acquired a proportion of it when the company he was running was disappearing down the tubes. But unless his conduct or the conduct of the pension trustees was illegal, in my view we’re stuck with this, even though it’s unpalatable. I cannot understand how liberals can support retrospective legislation such as that suggested. And I cannot understand how a government can hope to foster a respect for the rule of law when it changes that law retrospectively to punish someone disliked by the press. It smacks of legislation framed out of revenge, not reason.

We should tighten the loopholes for the future, sure. But making someone punishable in law for acts which were legal when committed should only happen in the gravest of circumstances (like after a war), if at all. And I don’t think this fits the bill.

A better legacy following this debacle is to make damn sure that this type of irresponsible banking can never happen again.

Sir Fred is not a man who walked in off the street to head up RBS. He worked at the top of banks generating billions for the country for years, and he accrued a lot of money doing it, rightly in my view. His organisation employed tens of thousands directly, and financed companies employing millions more. I know he screwed up something chronic, and we’re all paying for it now (including him, as a taxpayer), but I have a mortgage because banks leant me money, and I have a car for the same reason. And so do millions of others. And yes, the rules were too lax, and he made some awful decisions. But he alone wasn’t to blame. A problem this complex doesn’t have a solution that can fit as a banner headline on page 1 of the Daily Mail.

Sir Fred is a multi-millionaire, and this alone seems enough to outrage large sections of the community. I have heard many people say “It’s outrageous that a man can earn £650,000 per year,” and then just stop there. In my view, it’s not outrageous at all. I don’t care that the man’s loaded. Fair play to him and to everyone else who’s had the brains, gumption and luck to get to live the high life. I hope it happens to me and to all of you. And I hope you live in a retirement so comfortable that you never worry about a thing.

Yes, he earns a fortune, but he pays more in tax than most of the people on my street put together, but if his house is burning down the fire brigade don’t come ten times quicker to help him. I know that’s not a fashionable view to take, but there we are, that’s what I think.

The real outrage is that there are still millions of people in this country who will never earn £650,000 a year for a myriad reasons we should be directing our anger at instead of this one man. Millions of kids so deprived of love, support, not to mention aspiration, that they will never in a million years get the chance to sit in the boardroom of a bank except to clean it. Where’s the outrage at this on the front of the papers or on Facebook?

Where’s the outrage that OAPs reliant on the state pension have seen fixed costs sky-rocket in the last 12 years as Council Tax has doubled and fuel bills have gone up even further?

It’s all disappeared in a tirade of abuse aimed at this one man and his cronies. I don’t think it’s their fault, nor will taking Sir Fred Goodwin’s pension off him solve it. It’s odd that those at the forefront of the anti-Goodwin campaign are perhaps responsible more than any others for these wider, sadder injustices. Recessions will pass, but pensioners will die cold, and the kids born on the local Council estate will die younger and poorer than the kids born on my street.

Harriet Harman, Gordon Brown, Hazel Blears et al have had as many years and more in a position to influence things than Sir Fred. They should think a bit more widely about how to frame their criticisms. We could reduce Sir Fred’s pension to nothing tomorrow, and the money we’d save the taxpayer is nothing compared to the money I think we waste on schemes hatched by the Labour government. In this instance, their anti-Goodwin populism is hypocritical because it misdirects its anger.

But even though he’s been at the wheel of a car hurtling Britain towards meltdown, we still shouldn’t shred John Prescott’s pension, or Blears’ pension or Harman’s, like some want. Firstly, he had a job like everyone else does, and though we might think he did it badly, no court has said he’s done anything criminal and so he shouldn’t have his pension touched. He’s accrued it legally, over many years, and it’s his.

It seems like because he’s an MP, with a pension put funded by me and you, this should make it all the more vulnerable. But it shouldn’t. A pension pot is sacred money put aside for when someone can’t earn anything to support themselves, and although some people get more of it than others, as I said before we should be raising the bottom ones up not pushing the top ones down. Altering the principle on a whim sets a dangerous precedent at the behest of tabloid headlines. And how can anyone be confident in their pension if this kind of thing not only happens but is actively sanctioned by the government?

Yes, I know that some pension funds have disappeared completely, and others have been changed to the detriment of the beneficiaries. This needs to be stopped too. But the way to do it is through positive laws and tighter regulations so that people who screw up and impoverish thousands are punished in the courts and not just in their wallets on a whim by whichever newspaper screams loudest.

Again, this Prescott group on Facebook seems to be an attack on the rich and successful for the sake of it. I think we can do better with our arguments. We might not like Mr Prescott’s politics, and we might have an unfavourable view of him as a man because we’ve read stuff in the papers. But his job is subject to the most clear cut form of performance related pay of any job – UK elections. And he’s managed to win ten of them and stay an MP for nearly 40 years. Possibly because he’s campaigned for, and achieved, significant steps against poverty like the minimum wage. Just the type of thing which would actually help people far more than getting rid of rich people’s pensions.

Anyone with the brains to become Deputy Prime Minister and represent hundreds of thousands of people for decades as an MP could probably have earned significantly more by not serving the public as an MP and by being an accountant or a corporate lawyer (or a banker) instead. If we want the best to lead us in public service, we shouldn’t ask them to pay back money when the decisions they make with good intentions go wrong. We should vote them out and vote in people who’ll make it better and stop it happening again. How can we get good people to stand for anything if their every act risks personal financial ruin? That’s what the Facebookers seem to want.

The only good thing about the Facebook group is that it might give a subtle hint to Mr Prescott and others that jumping on bandwagons is only wise if you have nothing to be ashamed of yourself.

The Facebook group calls for the “shredding” of Mr Prescott’s pension because of his “unquestioning loyalty” to the government. Well, casting aside the convention of collective cabinet responsibility which actually makes effective government possible in the first place, this is the same government which has been elected the last three times out, including once after the Iraq war started. It might be annoying to some (including me) that that’s happened, but it’s happened all the same. The electoral system might be flawed in some people’s view, but it has spoken loud and clear, and even under a system of PR Labour would’ve been the largest party for years now, and Prescott would have been at the heart of it. If he’s been guilty of such terrible crimes, his bosses haven’t sacked him by voting for someone else.

Yes, he’s screwed up and his screw ups have affected lots of people. But he hasn’t done it alone, and neither has Sir Fred. He isn’t evil, and neither is Sir Fred. And neither of them should have their pension pots shredded. 

Instead of campaigning to shred people’s pensions, we should be campaigning to make every pensioner in this country comfortable enough to live a happy retirement. We should use our votes wisely, do our utmost to get the best people into local and central government, and make sure of two things. First, that this type of thing is never allowed to happen again. And second, that the real injustices in every community in the country are properly addressed.

Rick