Save our local Maternity Services

The decision taken by the last Labour government to close maternity services at both the Infirmary and at Fairfield was called in for review by the new Coalition government. I am delighted to add my voice to the campaign to keep maternity services local. For my own residents in the Norden ward, the important thing is that maternity services are not lost from both our local hospitals. The only alternatives to Fairfield and the Infirmary are Oldham Royal and North Manchester.

In explaining the new position, Mike Farrar, chief executive of NHS North West said: ‘As of now, the plans for the transfer of overnight maternity services from Fairfield Hospital, Rochdale Infirmary and Salford Royal, which were scheduled to take place in September 2011, have been put on hold. The strategic health authority, working with local GPs, will ensure that the Secretary of State’s four tests for reconfiguring services are properly applied in respect of this service.’

The four tests are:

- whether the unit had a high record of successful clinical outcomes

- whether patients and the public had been properly engaged in the consultation

- whether there is support form doctors for a retention

- how much choice in the decision had been given to mothers and families

I have sought to test local feeling about keeping the maternity services local, and have already received an excellent response to our petition across Norden, Bamford, Oakenrod, Birtle, Ashworth, Sudden, Brimrod and Marland. This shows the strength of feeling in the community.

We will be ready to make our case to government after the summer recess.

Consultation on Lenny Barn Playing Fields

A public meeting took place in the Town Hall on Thursday 22^nd July about the loss of Playing Fields on Lenny Barn and proposals to swap land in three different locations in compensation. I called the meeting following concerns from local residents who were not satisfied that the proposals were in the best interest of the charitable purposes of Lenny Barn. The meeting was attended by Council officers as well as local councillors and some 40 members of the public.

Falinge Park High School has been identified for a rebuild under the Council’s successful Building Schools for the Future programme. In order to cause as little disruption for pupils as possible and to avoid costs associated with temporary accommodation during building work the council has proposed to completely rebuild the school on Lenny Barn Playing Fields.

But the Council has to provide compensation for the loss of open playing fields and is currently consulting with the public on three alternative sites located at the former Innes School, an area within Falinge Park and at Foxholes.

The meeting was very useful, because people understood that we have to balance the need of the pupils attending the school against the loss of open playing fields, which are protected under charity law. Two main issues remain open for discussion following the meeting: The first is to which extent is it acceptable to build on Lenny Barn and whether the Council will reconsider the plan to completely rebuild the school. The second is whether the three sites currently proposed as compensation are suitable, and the benefits these new sites would provide to the public.

The Council will draw up proposals following the consultation, but the proposals will also have to be agreed by the Charity Commission.

The consultation period ends on the 13^th of August. For more information and to make a comment go to the Council’s website: http://www.rochdale.gov.uk/council_and_democracy/consultations/current_consultation_-_service/lenny_barn_playing_fields_cons.aspx

The mess Labour left us in

I am sure I am not the only one who finds it astonishing that our Labour MP Jim Dobbin managed to write a whole letter on the budget without one single mention of the terrible financial situation that his Government left us with. Not one mention of the £5000 a second that our country is borrowing; not one mention of the £70 billion a year that the government will soon be paying in interest alone; not one proposal for how Labour would tackle this enormous problem; and, of course, not one word of apology.

Labour MPs are sticking their fingers in their ears and their heads in the sand, hoping that no-one will remember that the mess the coalition government is now cleaning up is Labour’s legacy.

Mr Dobbin also seems to deliberately ignore that this budget contained many Lib Dem proposals to make our country fairer. Raising the income tax threshold, re-linking the basic state pension to earnings, increasing Capital Gains Tax for the richest, an extra £2 billion in child tax credits for the poorest families. These are real commitments that, at a time of difficult cuts, help to protect the least well-off.

We promised fairness during the election campaign, and we are now delivering it in government.

Meanwhile Labour MPs are not just acting irresponsibly, they are treating the public like fools – Mr Dobbin may hope that the public have already forgotten the mess his government left behind, but while it is rather convenient for politicians to have short memories, people usually don’t.

Building Schools for the Future

Last week the Education Secretary Michael Gove announced which projects under the ‘Building Schools For the Future’ (BSF) funding pot would be saved and which ones would be scrapped. All our Rochdale Borough projects are saved which is fantastic news!  Our new Rochdale Labour MP and our new Conservative Deputy Leader of the Council appeared on the front page of our local paper to take credit. But readers have not been given the true reason about why the £175 million school rebuilding program is to go ahead in Rochdale Borough, while elsewhere across the country schemes are being scrapped.

It’s not because Rochdale is a deprived borough, it’s not that the Council made a good case to government, and it’s not because our school buildings needed renovating any more than in other boroughs.

The reason is that in 2006 the new Lib Dem Cabinet and Council Officers grasped the opportunity to apply for the BSF money. We were one of the first councils in the country to go for it and over the next three years drew up plans, selected a development partner and made sure that all the contracts were signed before February 2010, when it became clear that all big capital spending programmes would come under review after the General Election.

Anybody who is familiar with the huge bureaucracy associated with the BSF programme will appreciate that our success in 2010 was only possible because of decisive decision making and thorough planning during the last four years while the Liberal Democrats were running the Council.

We had to take difficult and controversial decisions. BSF required school closures and mergers – for example we had to take the very difficult decision to close both Springhill and Balderstone and merge the two into a new school. A new academy school, St Anne’s, needed to be set up. On every occasion we were roundly criticized by the two opposition parties.

Any delays along the way and we would now be ringing our hands.

The implementation of the new building programme is still at the very beginning, but the most difficult stages of planning and decision making are now behind us. It is very easy to take credit in hindsight. It is much more difficult to take the right decision at the right time and ride the storms of opposition. It takes vision and leadership and the Liberal Democrats had both.

The Estate We’re In

Usually daytime telly isn’t worth the electricity it uses to keep it switched on after the morning news , but today I came across a programme, which kept me hooked. ‘The Estate we’re in’ is about run-down council estates and a plucky woman from North London, called Silla, who moves in to sort them out. What kept me ‘hooked’ wasn’t the fact that there was anything new, but that it was all so familiar: the dog mess, the graffiti, the dumped matresses, the lack of play and community facilitities, the resignation of the residents.

‘If you live in dirt you feel like dirt’

The route Silla takes to bring about the change isn’t anything unheard of either: bring back some community spirit, call a meeting and make residents act together, draw up a list of all the things they want to change. Call for a meeting with council officers and councillors. 

So far so good, all this gets done up and down the country more or less effectively by many individuals and groups. But what happens next is different and I have the teeny weeny suspicion the difference is that the eyes of the television crews are watching closely: 

Firstly the group of officers turning up to the meeting is obviously from the higher ranks of the council hierarchy indicating that this meeting gets some priority. Which council could easily afford bad publicity from the BBC.

But more importantly after the meeting, which is of course very positive, the usual inertia sets in, absolutely nothing happens, residents are being fobbed off on the phone and excuses are made while the council is  unaware that the cameras are still on.

And then Silla and the BBC march in! And suddenly things move very quickly.  By the end of the programme  (about two months in real time) dog bins are installed, a community garden is being planned and an empty facility on the estate looks to be opened for community use. And the residents are happy.

Do councils really need the nation’s televion crews on their fingers in order to get their act together? Why does council action- if at all- always take such an age, by which time most residents or anybody who tries to help them, has walked away in anger and frustration?

Yes changing our run down councuil estates is about pride and ownership of the residents but it is also about councils being prepared to act decisively, with real commitment and particularly without the maddening delays.

Is it really just the residents who need to’ take ownership’, what about the councils?

In these difficult economic times, the councils that succeed will be the councils that link themselves into communities.

Referendum on Alternative Vote

In May of next year when you all rush to the polls for the local elections, you will be given the opportunity to change the way elections are run forever. Thanks to the Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg voters will be given a chance to make their votes count like they never have before. I am of course referring to the referendum on the Alternative Vote System. If the referendum is passed, it will spell the end to tactical voting or a panic vote. You will be able to vote for who you want, and it will count more than it has ever done before.

This is an historic opportunity to replace the discredited system we currently use to elect our MPs with a system that – while not perfect – represents a vast improvement that will give politicians greater legitimacy and make them more accountable.

So in May when you are standing in the queue waiting to vote in the local elections, please make sure that you vote YES for the Alternative Vote System. The Liberal Democrats have enabled a great opportunity to make elections fairer for you, now it is up to you to make it happen.

You can read more about the Alternative Vote system HERE.

Earth Cafe Rochdale

Last night I went to the second meeting of Earth Cafe, a  new Environmental Information Education and Community Resource Centre, set up as a social entreprise in January 2010. About 30 people attended, a mixture of volunteers from community groups like the Friends of Broadfield Park and Spodden Valley,  Council officers from the Council’s Sustainability team and ‘even’ a few councillors.   A previously conducted survey had concluded that three main themes had emerged as a priority for the group to tackle: Food Growing, Cycling and Community Engangement. So we split in three groups to discuss what could be achieved around theses themes in 3-6 months. 

I sat with the cycling group, since cycling- or better the lack of opportunities for safe cycling- has been one of my big issues for a number of years. I also chair the Connect2 project. Connect2 is the name for the People’s Million Big Lottery bid which Sustrans won nearly three years ago.  78 councils were part of this bid and have received funding for various local cycling and walking projects aimed to ‘connect’ communities. Our project in Rochdale Borough focuses on the Rochdale Canal Tow Path as as a spine route from which several cycling paths then branch out and connect all four Townships in the borough. Our long-term aim is to create a meaningful complete network of safe cycling and wallking routes, away from the main car traffic.

The first thing that emerged from the discussions yesterday is that this project is largely unknown even to environmental activists in the borough. This is symptomatic for a lot of things in our Council. We actually do a good number of good things; we do them well, but a lot of  people do not know about them.

So while some people, who are directly affected or live very local to a particular project, might be happy, the vast majority in the rest of the borough doeesn’t know about it.

People then start  campaigning in their own ‘smallish’ corner for something similar and reinvent the wheel, spend a lot ot time looking for support from various public bodies, when it could be so much more effective and enjoyable to communcate directly with people who have done something similar, share experience and create a much bigger inpact by acting together.

This is by no means a criticism of the voluntary groups of people who come together to campaign for a particular thing. Much rather I would like us councillors and the Council to understand that we are missing out on big opportunites if we allow voluntary groups to scramble around unsupported for a long time before they understand where and how to get support to progress their particular issue. We should harness the energy and enthusiasm with which a lot of people start off with. All too often people walk away after many frustrating months of getting absolutely nowhere.

My hope for Earth Cafe is that it will provide this badly needed platform for bringing  various environmental community groups together, sharing information and skills and pressurising the Council for better support.

I look forward to the next meeting.

for more info about Earth Cafe go to: www.earthcafe.org.uk 

for more info for Connect2 go to: www.sustransconnect2.org.uk

if you want to come to our next Connect2 steering group meeting, please get in touch with me and I make sure you get an invitation. the next meeting is on 12th July 10

Video Blog: Post-election update

Welcome to My New Blog!

I have been blogging on various sites for some years since becoming a councillor and it has become time to set up my own blog.

I hope that this blog will become a forum for some interesting debates about local and national issues such as the need to save money and how we best achieve this without hurting the most vulnerable people. Some tough decisions will have to be made not just at government level but also in our Council. By involving as many people as possible in this debate my hope is that we all come to a better understanding of how to split the burden fairly.

But there will also be some more directly local issues and I intend to share some of my ideas and ambitions I have as Chair of Rochdale Township.

So please join in, but please remember to be polite ! I am looking forward to some lively discussions!