We have been working to make sure that the filth on the road and pavement on Finchale Road at the new housing development is dealt with. Cllr Hopgood is dealing with the developer to make sure that action is taken and is also helping residents with a number of other related issues. We have previously had to intervene over issues affecting residents on Aykley Vale and Lilac Avenue as well.
Update on Broadband issues at Finchale Abbey and Rosemount
Last week I had a meeting with the Director of Openreach operations for the North East, and the Head of ICT on Durham County Council to try and sort out the continuing problems at these two sites.I have been working regularly on these for a ling time now and it has been a really hard slog. Across the Country thousands of communities are still missing out. Thankfully an end is in sight at least in our patch after all this chasing and pressure.
ROSEMOUNT
Early last year BT promised a new broadband box would be put in and be active for the summer. It didn’t happen. BT have apologised to me and said this promise should never had been made.
Issues of land access have now been sorted out. Issues of cost to provide electricity have been sorted out. Although BT confirmed that the Council’s contract is one of the reasons for the delay – i.e. they have put all resources into the Digital Durham contract which is separate to the Rosemount work, I have now been promised that this will not hold up the work. Our pressure in really pushing this has taken it up the agenda.
BT have confirmed that the final work required is now guaranteed to be funded in the coming financial year (April), and that their aim is to get this work done as a matter of urgency. I will be updating residents in the coming months on timescales when BT let me know but they are fully aware now that this is a PR problem for them and I am certain they will work hard to get a quick result. Certain because we will be chasing them if it doesn’t happen!
Clearly our public and private pressure has finally paid off.
FINCHALE ABBEY VILLAGE
This is part of the Digital Durham contract, but is not an easy one to fix. The location means that getting access is more difficult as potentially BT will need to provide a cross-river supply. However, I have been given a guarantee that this will be part of this year’s work program which is due to commence in June/July and run for unto 18 months. The Council, with BT will be working hard to get the program up and running and are aware of the importance that is placed on action by Finchale Abbey residents and us as local Lib Dem councillors. I have been given assurances that updates will be passed to me in the coming months so that residents can get a better indication of timescales. In the meantime we are checking to see if anything can done to improve speeds in the meantime. What is guaranteed is that at every opportunity we will be chasing this one as much as Rosemount!
BABY WILKES ARRIVES – HURRAH!!!!
Fantastic news in the Wilkes household – we have a baby!! A boy, 7.5lb (3.4kg) born yesterday. I will be taking a couple of weeks leave and will not be checking emails very often or taking calls, so please contact Mamie on 01913869006 or Amanda on 07500125333.
LOCAL SURVEY
We are currently carrying out a local survey to find out what matters to residents. You can complete it online at this link:
CUTS? – YOU’VE NEVER HEARD ANYTHING SO UNBELIEVABLE
I sat for a while wondering how to tell this story – I wasn’t sure residents would believe me!.
We got an email today explaining that the Council has been cutting the grass of private landowners for free and will now stop doing.
It would appear that 2234 private properties have been having their lawns cut for free for years as a result of the complete incompetence of our Labour-run authority. When properties transfer under the right to buy, the garden also transfers, however unless residents tell the council to stop cutting the grass, it appears they carried on doing it! Now the housing stock has moved to separate ownership it seems all this has come to light.
Now you may think that I am making this up, but today is not 1st April its 1st March.
I did a few quick calculations. Assuming that the average gardener charges say £20 for cutting your grass, and assuming that this has been going on for at least 6 years, that works out at £4.289 million. However we all know that Durham County Council is not efficient, so it could have cost more !
It is however possible that some gardens could have been cut for longer than 6 years as the right to buy came in under the Tories under Maggie Thatcher. So just think – you might have been paying your council tax so one of your neighbours could get their grass cut for free for the last 30 years.
The incompetence of Labour and Durham County Council really does know no bounds. This is one cut I am happy to say I agree with!!
Article 4 – Student and HMO housing – Lib Dem success for our area
The council has completed its consultation on introducing new rules in the City on student/HMO housing. The aim of this is to protect areas from having too many houses of multiple occupation, to avoid the negative consequences. When we found out about this last year, we immediately asked for our area to be included as it had been ignored. An initial consultation was arranged by your Lib Dem councillors.
The council has now accepted that the area should be considered for inclusion, and a final round of consultation will start soon, along with a couple of drop in events in our area which we have requested.
Our previous post on this can be found here:
http://markwilkes.mycouncillor.org.uk/2015/09/29/article-4-direction-framwellgate-moor-area/
Please do join in the consultation and help us ensure that our area retains a mixed community without any further increase in the problems which HMOs can cause in the wrong places. as soon as it is active we will post a link here and give details of the event dates.
3.9% Council tax hike, services cut money in council bank accounts heads towards quarter of a billion pounds
No that isn’t a misprint. The council has well over £200m in reserves, is spending hardly any of them, in fact it looks like they may rise further, and on top of that has agreed to 3.9% council tax rise. We tried to get this restricted to 2% for adult care costs but were voted down.
If the council had no money I could understand the council tax hike. If we were protecting services I could understand it. However to simply increase council tax and put the money in reserves whilst our roads and footpaths fall to bits, school buildings deteriorate and our museums are closed just doesn’t stack up.
We will continue to push for affordable investment, protection of services and a reasonable council tax level, whilst Labour just keeps cutting services and pocketing residents money.
Orchard started at St Godric’s School
Following the recent creation of the 50 tree orchard between Newton Hall and Framwellgate Moor, which your Mamie, Amanda and I arranged and helped to plant with allotment holders and other local residents, we had a few trees left over.
After a quick chat with the head teacher at St Godric’s, we decided it would be great for them to start their own orchard, and so nine new fruit trees have been planted in the grounds, and we are working with the school to help them further improve their playing areas.
We are continuing to work to get more areas planted with hedges, trees or orchards, so please let us know of any site you think would benefit, and get in touch if you want to help out.
Council budget shame
On Monday I emailed Councillor Simon Henig to ask permission! to ask a question related to the budget at Wednesday’s Cabinet meeting: When Cabinet was to approve the final budget. He refused my request and I was told that no back bench member (116 councillors) would be permitted to ask Cabinet ANY questions on their budget proposals.
So I then asked if he or any of his Cabinet colleagues would be attending the budget scrutiny meeting on Friday (today). To date he has still not responded to me, and NOT A SINGLE CABINET MEMBER ATTENDED!!
In that meeting, the only one before the budget is voted on by Full Council, I brought along some recommendations for Scrutiny to put to Cabinet. This related to stopping service cuts to neighbourhood wardens, museums and local AAP budgets as well as trying to stop reductions in staffing numbers in planning. I also had three proposals asking to provide funding to road and footpath repairs, careers advice services for young people, and stopping the council profiting from essential work to school buildings.
I gave 20 copies of this to the Chairman Councillor Joe Armstrong prior to the meeting. The only issue on the agenda was the budget. The whole purpose of the meeting was to make recommendations to Cabinet and to provide comments. Cllr Armstrong told me that he would not allow the proposals to be discussed because “It was too late to make any changes to the budget”. So why then bother with holding the meeting?
In the meeting I was refused the opportunity to discuss the proposals but I handed round the single A4 sheet anyway. Other than these proposals which I was refused to discuss, not one single councillor put forward a single proposal on the budget.
SO SCRUTINY DIDN’T MAKE A SINGLE RECOMMENDATION. THAT’S 116 BACKBENCH COUNCILLORS AND NO RECOMMENDATIONS PUT TO CABINET.
My proposals from the Lib Dem group have been passed to Cabinet with no comments from scrutiny. I was refused a vote on any of them, refused discussion on any of them, and at no point in any meeting has Cabinet allowed a single question to be asked of Cabinet members about their budget plans.
Next week full council will vote on the budget. Labour will simply vote through the report. Every single Labour councillor will then be responsible for that budget.
Expect just £5m of council money to go on repairing roads with the £10m from government – despite us having a backlog of £250 million of repairs needed.
Expect the council to continue to make profits at many different levels from repairs to the schools they own, and to put that profit not back into school repairs, but into reserves.
Expect neighbourhood wardens to be cut. Expect the planning department and the support departments around it to have their staffing reduced so less proper scrutiny of planning applications will be possible.
Expect an excellent plan to help young people with careers advice not to be implemented by September – partly the fault of the Conservative government delaying European funding (I wonder why), but mainly the fault of DCC for failing to agree to fund it.
Expect a budget which will see us spend hardly any reserves, and still have over £200 million in the bank.
Expect a hike in council tax of 3.9% and for much of that money too, to end up in reserves this year.
On the bright side. The six communications departments that we have been telling the council to bring together for years are now to be brought into one department.
If they had done this years ago when it was first put forward by opposition councillors – indeed its been put forward every year for many years – we would now have MILLIONS OF POUNDS more to improve our roads or schools, or other services.
Why wasn’t it done earlier? Why have Labour wasted taxpayers money delaying so many areas of saving which do not affect front line services?
Answer?
Incompetence.
The undemocratic way in which the budget is put together at Durham County Council is unacceptable and must change. The only way to do it is to change the political leadership.
Labour Cabinet members seem blind to the fact that if you are transparent and work with the public, the opposition and even their own back benchers, good ideas can benefit not only residents but also them, the Council and even the Labour Party.
Simply ignoring everything which comes forward from outside that clique of 10 Cabinet members simply results in bad publicity all round. To coin a phrase from Forrest Gump – Stupid is as stupid does.
BT Broadband box still empty after 8 months
After finally running out of patience with BT Openreach and the Council we are now trying the press route to try and get some action to bring proper broadband to the area. Parts of Rosemount in Pity Me and Finchale Abbey Village have less than 1mb broadband.
A box I managed to get BT Openreach to install for Rosemount remains empty after 8 months of being installed and BT have failed in their promise that residents would have broadband by last summer. The story is on the front of today’s Durham Times, as well as in the Northern Echo.
A very senior BT Openreach manager told me last week that the reason the broadband was not installed was because they had to use all their resources to complete the Digital Durham program for the Council and that as a result their commercial program was further delayed.
A less senior employee told the Council and press that it was because of the cost of getting an electricity supply to the site, despite it being on the main road where there must be some supply available. I strongly believe that the Council could do more and also think that the government should intervene to make sure that all areas which have poor broadband should be treated equally.
We are trying to arrange a meeting with the Council head of service and the BT regional manager to try and get this concluded.
In addition we continue to fight to get improvements for Finchael Abbey Village where broadband speeds are even slower and residents ahve been told they should get Satellite broadband – which costs an arm and a leg.
Hopefully we can get both of these issues sooner rather than later for residents, despite the fact that actually it is not an issue for which councillors are responsible.
Northern Echo Story: