I have just been out leafleting and once again had the distinct misfortune to find myself on Knowle Drive, the great forgotten road in my ward, the surface of which is not at all dis-similar to the surface of the Moon.

Numerous residents of this little street have complained to me and to colleagues about the state of the road before. And another one collared me today. I agree with their views entirely. Having been asked to stump up ever-increasing amounts of tax, they are within their rights to expect to drive from one end of their road to the other without feeling like they’re in a giant tumble dryer.

The annoying part for me is that there’s very little I can say beyond “I agree 100% with what you’re saying.” I must have asked the Council half a dozen times or more for their assistance with this road. But as I have mentioned on here before, the entire budget for minor road repairs for Prestwich in 2008-9 is £108,000, and the single neediest road costs one and a half times this amount. Without something radical, the people of Knowle Drive have got about as much chance of seeing their road satisfactorily repaired as I do of winning Wimbeldon.

Which, for local people, is hugely annoying and begs the oft-repeated question “where does all the money go?” I know that the answer to this is fantastically complicated, and that the oft-repeated “answer” that it is all wasted on asylum seekers and managers is entirely false. But for me, the lack of understanding and the huge amount of frustration that the ongoing inaction fosters amongst local people highlights a bigger worry - a complete lack of communication from the Council about why priorities are the way they are.

I try to explain local residents about the increasing cost of social care, say, and the investment in Children’s Services. But I can’t do it half as well as the Council could, by showing people that the reason their road hasn’t been done this year is because we’ve recruited a dozen new care co-ordinators instead, and as a result 100 more elderly people are being cared for at home. They mightn’t be happy about the road, but at least they’d understand why. At the moment there isn’t even that, and there’s resentment growing.

I read Council communications, and they don’t do the job. They tell half a tale, stressing the positives without ever talking about the sacrifices. They treat Council Tax payers as children, with a patronising dis-regard which never comes near to discussion of a real issue. It has to change. When I write St Mary’s Focus I try and put both sides of the story, because it’s rare that there’s an issue simple enough to be dealt with in a line or two. But the Council, and the national government as well, brush argument and difficulty under the carpet with sham “consultations” and phony words which are designed to win people round but in reality do the reverse. Why are they so scared of telling the whole story?

For the time being all I have for Knowle Drive is a shrug of agreement and the will to somehow pester the Council enough to have them pay for the repairs to shut me up. It’s not really all I should have up my sleeve.

Rick

Last night’s Prestwich LAP contained one gigantic disappointment - the list of roads identified as most in need of repair, and the frankly laughable amount of money given over to repair them.

As in previous years, the top dozen roads are identified. These, remember, are the least well-maintained roads, the ones with most pot-holes, cracks, loose paving stones and all the other hazards and unpleasantness that makes driving or walking down them dangerous.

The total estimated cost to repair all twelve is £596,000. The total budget allocated to fix Prestwich roads this year is just £108,000. That’s only 18% of the money needed to fix even the twelve most needy! That figure of £596,000 doesn’t even consider the 13th worst road, let alone the 14th, or the 114th, or the countless other roads with holes and cracks.

We have less than one fifth of the money necessary to repair our dozen neediest roads, and this is a disgrace.

Six of the dozen roads have been held back from previous years because of funding problem. One of them, Fairway in Sedgley, will cost by itself nearly £50,000 more than the entire budget allocated for roads. In St Mary’s, Sunny Drive and Barnhill Drive have been identified as needing work, but if both of these schemes get the go-ahead, this will account for nearly half of the entire available budget.

This is a matter which Liberal Democrats will certainly be taking up at Council level, to try and convince the Council to provide more funding for roads which are verging on the dangerous. The costs of compensation for trips and falls must surely point to the dire need for investment. But at the moment the people of Prestwich are very badly done to when the cost of replacing the pavement alone on Parrenthorn Road in Holyrood is more than the whole budget for roads and pavements for the whole of Prestwich.

The decision on which roads get repaired will be made by the Town Centre Regeneration Group, which is a sub-group of the LAP. I will make representations to this group on behalf of residents, but unfortunately this grossly inappropriate funding means that many local people will be left sorely disappointed by a Conservative council failing to prioritise roads in a budget already cut to shreds by a Labour government.

Rick

Last night’s meeting of the Prestwich Local Area Partnership (LAP) was successful on a number of fronts.

First, there were no recorded fatalities despite the meeting taking place in a room hotter than an angry volcano. If I’d have known what the temperature was going to be, I’d have brought along a couple of eggs to fry on the floor rather than waiting until I got home for tea. I would also have probably removed my tie, although I may not have gone quite as far as one member of the panel who decided to leave any semblance of respect at home as well as his formal attire, and come in a t-shirt.

The substance of the meeting was also pleasing as well. The “business” part of the meeting saw reports back from a number of the groups operating in Prestwich to make the community better, and we learned about their successes in the past couple of months. There were also updates from partners including the police (reporting a fall in most types of crime), the NHS (presenting about new GP facilities in Bury, although not in Prestwich), and the fire service.

Then the “Open Forum” gave the chance for lots of local residents to raise issues about the work of the partnerships. Once again there were frustrations raised about street cleaning, and I have now asked for a formal response from the Director of Environmental Services as to why the pavement-sweeping machines aren’t being used properly around here. Also, there were calls for larger bins on the precinct, and more action to be taken on pigeons. I was pleased to report that work to pigeon-proof the Precinct will take place this Sunday after I asked for it to be done some time ago.

Perhaps the main event though was the initial options report from URBED, the design consultancy we have engaged to consider options for the future of Prestwich Town Centre. The options that they put forward are really just their first thoughts, and do lack certain of the elements which they will have in their final form (such as the west of Bury New Road, links to the Clough and full consideration of traffic and parking), but they do give a flavour of some of the types of things that we could consider for the next 5-10 years in Prestwich. There was a full and frank discussion afterwards from amongst the many dozens of local people who came to the meeting, and the options are available for all to view in Prestwich library.

Rick

Only a brief post today, because I am struggling to breath under the weight of work I keep putting off to do Council things…

Yesterday’s Annual Council was a remarkably dull affair. The whoops, screams, and general childishness I expected from the ruling group on their assumption of overall control for the first time in Bury sine 1986 didn’t emerge. So credit to them for that. It beats their various displays in Council over the last twelve months. Instead, the historic moment passed in a grumbled “aye” when the motion to let the Conservatives form the Executive was put to Council.

The only other marginally exciting part of the agenda (and I use that phrase with a spade-full of salt) concerned democratic arrangements, and was postponed. So we were left with various annual reports, all of which were informative, but none of which were in the least bit fun.

I am prepared for the LAP tonight, which, just to remind anyone who wants to come, is at Prestwich’s Longfield Suite, from 18:30. There will be presentations on the Urbed regeneration and on local health services, as well as the open forum where you can ask us anything (to do with the work of the LAP, obviously).

So maybe I’ll see you there.

Rick

The first Prestwich Local Area Partnership of the Municipal Year takes place at 6.30pm pm Thursday 15th May 2008 at The Longfield Civic Suite, Prestwich. Come along and see the launch of the “Love Prestwich” anti-litter campaign, which follows on from some of the work local Lib Dem Councillors have been leading on in getting the Council to tackle the “Dickensian filth” which sometimes plagues local streets.

Prestwich LAP will launch its Love Prestwich Litter Campaign for the summer which aims to target Prestwich Village Town Centre to promote respect of the environment to residents and businesses to Love Prestwich and keep it clean. Lots of the problems we have with litter are caused by people dropping it, and we need to create a lot more pride in our local area. So many local people tell me that they lovel Prestwich, so now is the time to show it.

The meeting will also feature URBED, the regeneration specialists who we’ve been working with on plans for the future of the Village centre. Following on from the huge turn out at Prestwich Visioning event in March, URBED will be coming along on Thursday to say what people Love about Prestwich Village and how it might move forward.  They will have some initial options and ideas to put forward of how the future of Prestwich may look in the future, and there’ll be the opportunity to ask questions on what you see. 

There’s so much going on in Prestwich at the moment, and I’m confident that we stand at the start of a hugely exciting time.  This is the perfect opportunity to come and have your say. As well as the URBED proposals and the Love Prestwich campaign, the Open Forum will be at 7.30 for any concerns members of the public may want to raise about anything at all to do with the Council, Police, Fire and Health services, and the local area in general.

It will also give you the chance to meet the newest Lib Dem Councillor in Prestwich, Cllr Mary D’Albert, who will join the LAP for the first time.

Please do come to the meeting and have your say on what’s going on in Prestwich.

Rick 

This week’s “First” magazine, produced by the Local Government Association, has a letter from me in it which continues a debate about how to attract younger people, and those from a successful business background, towards being a Councillor.

The thrust of my argument is that I think Councillors should be paid more - in fact, they should be paid a large proportion of the salary that they give up to become Councillors. It’s no wonder that the average age of Councillors in England is 58, and that so many Executive Members are retired, when the allowances are so low. For me to be an effective Executive Member in Bury, I might have to give up half my working week or more. The amount of money I’d be given in return would nowhere near compensate for my lost wages. And of course I’d be trading job security and swift career progression for a potentially vulnerable Council job which might disappear at the next election.

I know that being a Councillor is about public service and volunteering to help the community. That’s fine, and I do it without complaint. But if the opportunity arose to become an Executive Member, and I’d been judged appropriate by the electorate first and my fellow Councillors second, I’d have to turn it down on financial grounds. And that’s surely not right. I wouldn’t be able to afford the mortgage. And I would lose the chance to get promoted at work because I wouldn’t be there half the time.

We are asking Councillors to be leaders, but we aren’t paying for the qualities of leadership. What person in their right mind would swap financial security for themselves and their family in exchange for a Council Executive Member position?

Of course some people do it part time, and manage adequately. But Councils have budgets of hundreds of millions of pounds, and the Executive Members are responsible for it. Some may argue that spending, say, £50,000 on an Executive Member is a waste of public money. But we happily pay that for some Council officers. And is it not a worthy investment to pay for the best people to guard these massive budgets well?

MPs are the same. We pay MPs £60,000. That’s lots more than the average salary, but it’s lots less than a huge proportion of MPs would be able to earn in the private sector. The brightest, most able working people in our society earn lots of money, and rightly so in my book. So why would they be attracted to public service when the trade-off is so poor? It’s why so many of them claim so much on expenses. Not because they’re all thieves, but because they’re working seven day weeks, running two homes, missing their families, and losing out on tens of thousands of pounds of wages they’d earn doing any other job.

I’m not saying we should pay MPs and Councillors the same as merchant bankers or top barristers. But let’s reward the impact that they can make in communities by giving a reasonable salary. To put this in context - the three Councillors in St Mary’s ward earn less between them for their Councillor work than a single average salary in this country. Executive Members, most of whom are full time, earn only about half an average salary. And the Prime Minister is paid less than some Council Chief Executives.

These days, with £200,000 starter-homes, student loan repayments, rising bills and everything else, the brightest young things are rarely going to opt for public service ahead of financial security. It’s sad, yes, but it’s inevitable unless we face up to the fact that to be an effective Councillor means sacrificing lots of time, and thus requires adequate financial recompense.

We all want a diverse crop of Councillors who are all the most committed and able people to lead our communities. But if we want leaders, we must pay for them.

Rick

I was proud last night to join many other local residents in signing the nomination papers for Mary D’Albert to be the Liberal Democrat candidate for St Mary’s ward in the local elections on May 1^st.

Mary’s long-standing record of hard work and local activism is to be admired, as is her sommittment to the local party and its efforts to make Prestwich and Bury better for local people. I have no doubt that she will be a very capable Councillor working continually for the people of the ward.

Mary has lived in Prestwich for decades, and is not only familiar with the issues that matter locally, but feels them personally because she has been a member of this community for so long. Local candidates are vital for local Councils.

Mary has campaigned hard to protect our local Post Offices, in contrast to our local Labour party who’s own MP voted to close thousands more Post offices just last week, including potentially nine more in Bury. Labour should be ashamed. They can’t claim to be standing up for the community when they tried to close our school a couple of years back, and are trying to close our Post Offices now. We opposed them then, we oppose them now, and Mary D’Albert and the Lib Dems will continue to support local community facilities forever.

Mary D’Albert has campaigned with Liberal Democrats in Bury on many issues – she joined our campaigning to stop Labour proposals to close Prestwich Arts College, for instance. She’s been working with Rainsough residents trying to broker a solution on the shops issue, and she’s been instrumental in working with Lib Dems and the Local Area Partnership to bring tens of thousands of pounds to communities across Prestwich.

In the coming weeks Mary and I will be joining the rest of the Bury Lib Dems in asking you for your votes on May 1^st. We are confident that a local, hard-working candidate is a better bet for Prestwich than Labour’s party hack who has been parachuted in to replace the retiring Labour Councillor who led the failed policy to close our local school.

There’ll be plenty more written here and in leaflets about the election in the coming weeks, but for now let me say again that I am proud to have nominated Mary D’Albert to be the next Liberal Democrat councillor for St Mary’s ward, and to join Donal O’Hanlon and me in leading the renaissance of our area.

Rick

Just a brief posting about the new St Mary’s Rose, the Labour leaflet, which I read whilst out leafleting in the ward today (this is about the third one they’ve done - there must be an election coming up!).

Having turned their vitriol-fuelled fire up to “furnace” with the last issue, this time they plunge new depths with an outright and massive lie, putting on paper for the first time what they’ve almost said in the past - that Lib Dems in Bury shouldn’t complain to the Council when things go wrong because the Lib Dems and the Tories “are the Council.”

That’s an absolute lie. The people who wrote it know it’s a lie. And if they had any decency they would publicly retract it and let the people of this ward decide the coming election on facts, not falsehoods. They are spreading lies for votes. That’s not what any of us should be doing. It brings the reputation of all of us down.

If this is what the St Mary’s Labour candidate was taught (and was teaching) at Labour campaign school, then there is a sickness at the heart of his party of which he should be utterly ashamed.

Just for the record, once again, the Liberal Democrats and Conservatives are not in any coalition, alliance, or anything else. The Conservatives control Bury Council. Lib Dems and Labour have one member of the Executive each, the Conservatives have all the rest. There’s no coalition, no joint policy making, no joint anything. Labour’s leaflet is lying. It’s lying because they want power in Bury, and they are so obsessed with holding on to their last seat in Prestwich that they are stooping to incredibly low depths to do it.

This isn’t political spin. It’s not their take on things as opposed to our take on things. It’s an actual lie. It’s like saying the sky is yellow or the Moon is made of cheese. It’s just not true. Don’t believe it.

I could take a bit of story-fiddling. I could live with them spinning things to suit them. It’s how politics works (although I wish it wasn’t). We all write leaflets promoting ourselves and our achievements, and we all go over the top sometimes. But what St Mary’s Labour are doing is just telling lies in the hope that it wins them votes. It isn’t right.

As it goes, I think the rest of their leaflet is twaddle as well, but that’s pretty much their side of a story against our’s. There are grains of fact in what they say, even if it is skewed virtually beyond recognition and the facts are consumed in rubbish. I can live with that. Let the people decide, fine. I’ll write a better one for us.

But the coalition thing is a downright lie. So don’t be fooled. I would like them to produce a single piece of evidence to back up their claim, and I will gladly speak to anyone who rings me up to speak to me about it, if you aren’t clear. Including St Mary’s Labour, who I know read this blog, and who I take no delight in telling, once again, that they should be ashamed of their continuing actions.

Rick

Last night was another meeting of the Resource and Performance Overview and Scrutiny Commission. The agenda was fairly short last night, and made even shorter when the main item was postponed.

It was supposed to be a report on a strategy for the Borough’s Civic Halls (including the Longfield Suite in St Mary’s). Instead of a paper outlining where the Council wants to go in the future, it was simply a statement of where we are now, lacking in foresight and vision, and really a very disappointing piece of work, not least for the members of the public there to hear it.

The role of scrutiny is to discuss Council policy is detail. Civic Halls are important to people, as community facilities, and much loved buildings (in some cases, not necessarily Prestwich!). But they are also expensive, so we need to know what the Council wants to do - do we want community facilities that might lose money, and if so, how will we fund them? Or do we want commercially run venues, and if so, what will that mean for the community?

I don’t know the answer, but we need to have the debate. We need the Executive of the Council to come up with a strategy for Halls that we can debate and discuss with local people. At the moment they are content to muddle along in a halfway house scenario where the halls are attempting to do both things but are doing neither of the two options well.

So we sent the report back, and will hopefully have our strategy at a future meeting.

Also on the agenda last night was a report on Housing management costs. Six Town Housing, who manage the Council’s housing stock, are still expensive, and still costing more than before. This is worrying because their service isn’t very good either in a lot of areas. However, the report painted some positive pictures, including rent arrears falling. The Six Town picture may be getting slightly rosier, which is good news.

Rick

In a shapshot, here’s what was agreed at last night’s Budget Council: 

- a Council Tax rise of 3.4% from 1st April. This is a significantly lower rise than in recent years - which is good. 

- A discount for the over 65s of 3.4% off their council tax. 

- The ability for people to pay their council tax in 12 installments, not 10 as is the case now, if they want. 

- More money to pay for pressures on services for disabled people, more money (thanks to the Lib Dems!) for environmental issues like parks, street cleaning and environmental enforcement. 

- A “capital programme” over the next three years which includes building the new High School at Radcliffe Riverside, as well as plans to develop Phillips Park Hall in Prestwich. 

What did the Liberal Democrats do?

The Liberal Democrats proposed an amendment to the Budget which proposed to reallocate just over £1/3 million of different expenditure than what was being proposed by the Conservative Party administration that runs Bury. 

£250,000 to maintain services in a number of important areas for young people and children. This included: - saving proposed cuts to the youth service and schools advice services. We believe that services for young people are an essential, not just for their own sake, but also because they help tackle issues like anti-social behaviour. 

- saving proposed cuts to services to vulnerable children including: disabled children, the whole young carers service, the whole service to support parents with mental health needs, and vulnerable children at risk. 

£100,000 of new expenditure for our parks, streets and environment 

- we proposed £50,000 on environmental issues to help deal with issues such as Street Cleaning and maintaining the “Green Flag” status of our parks. We’ve been promised a Saturday clean of town centre areas which should be excellent 

- we proposed £50,000 on environmental enforcement which will tackle issues such as fly-tipping, dog fouling and stray dogs (dog warden service). 

The Liberal Democrat Group amendment was accepted (not, it should be noted with any support from the Labour Party…) and became part of the agreed budget. 

Labour proposed to:

- ignore the needs of disabled people in Bury by removing £700,000 of much needed expenditure for people with learning and physical disabilities. This is a disgrace. They should be ashamed of suggesting that disabled people don’t need services from the Council. 

- ignore the needs of children and young people by cutting £350,000 of services for young people and vulnerable children. Mostly this was exactly the same list of services saved by the Liberal Democrats.  

- cut youth services, cut ALL services to young carers, cut services for disabled children and, most worryingly, cut services for vulnerable children at risk. This is a disgrace. 

- put the future finances of the council at risk by spending all the “reserves” down to the bare minimum (reserves are needed to cope for emergencies such as spending on flooding, unexpected demand etc) AND ignoring the long standing “equal pay” issue to address women employees who have been paid less than men doing the same job. 

And the Conservatives… 

In the end it was the proposals of the Conservative Party, with the addition of the new expenditure proposed by the Liberal Democrats that won the day which are outlined about. 

We didn’t feel able to support all the proposals of the Conservatives - particularly some of the savings around the environment and social services, so abstained on the final vote.

Rick