Bolton Council - New Homes Bonus

Letter to Bolton News (Not published)

Dear Sir,

May I be amongst the first to congratulate Bolton Council on its receipt of the latest tranche of the New Homes Bonus.

This is of course the money paid for each new property built in the Borough or each home brought back into use. For each property, it is equivelant to the national average Council Tax for that property band and is paid for each of the six years following the construction or renovation.

The purpose of this grant is to encourage the building of new homes and will help the Council achieve the necessary target of building 700 plus homes for each of the years up to 2025.

Bearing this in mind, it was puzzling that more effort was not put into achieving the building of the 88 dwellings on a plot of land in Little Lever for which planning permission had been given.

This would have produced over six years a bonus of some £600,000 plus Section 106 monies of £238,000 for that development let alone the ongoing Council Tax receipts.

Instead, in their wisdom, the Council chose to promote the more controversial £5m supermarket scheme which on completion will produce Sec 106 monies of £30,000.

Which would you have chosen?

Notwithstanding all this, I hope I am not stating the obvious by recommending that the £8.4m received so far should not be absorbed into the black hole of general Council expenditure, but be used to construct further affordable homes thus attracting even more bonuses.

At a rough estimate, using land already owned by the Council, £8.2m would build another 136 homes.

Paul Richardson

Ripon Close

Little Lever

Letters update - Bolton Council Planning Process is 'Bent'? - 6th Dec 2013 (Not yet published)

Dear Sir,

May I commiserate with Councillor Morgan following his failed attempt to establish an investigation into breaches of Planning Consents.

I wish I could say I was surprised, but the attitude of the Council is well summed up by the breathtakingly complacent statement from Councillor Morris that he didn’t think that there was a problem with the Planning system.

Oh, really?

As a member of the Planning Committee, Councillor Morgan needs to look a bit closer to home. The problem isn’t to do with Mr Smith/Patel sticking an extra couple of feet on his extension, it is to do with the Department of Development and Regeneration deciding that this or that is going to happen and bending over backwards to make sure that it happens irrespective of the rigid constraints of the Planning Process. The supine Planning Committee are complicit in this.

Without wishing to be boring, the Tesco at Little Lever application is a perfect example of this. There is still no doubt in my mind that let alone a coach and horses, a complete wagon train was driven through the requirements of the Planning Process to achieve approval. Even the stipulation of the Committee that the Traffic Arrangements be reconsidered was ignored with the result that upon completion we’ll be faced with gridlock.

Now, the proposed Middlebrook development is deferred on the pretence of traffic issues.

A more likely reason is to avoid upsetting developers Emerson who are involved with the Council’s favourite development at the Loco Works and Bluemantle who financed the Director’s recent jolly to Cannes and have spent five years not financing the Church Wharf development.

As to the rest of the town, it doesn’t take much looking around to discover the ‘successes’ of the Planning system. Odeon – Lido – make up your own list.

Finally, the passing of plans for the £48m new bus station linked to the railway station just as rail services are being reduced to a level not much above those in the film ‘The Titfield Thunderbolt.’ What vision!.

I fervently hope that the Electors of the Borough will take full advantage of next May’s Local Elections to show Councillor Morris exactly what they think of his Planning System.

Paul Richardson

Ripon Close

Little Lever.

Letters update - Local Elections 2014 - 18th October 2013

Dear Sir,

As the evenings draw in and the memories of summer fade, my thoughts are drawn towards the local elections of next May.

These will provide the first opportunity in two years for the electors of the Borough to express an opinion on how their Councillors and the Council as a whole have executed their stewardship of the well being of the town.

It would seem that measured against a multitude of indicators, the town of Bolton is falling down the league tables faster than the Wanderers.

Since all local authorities are suffering from reductions in Government funding on a broadly equal basis, the question must be asked as to why it is that our town is performing more poorly than others.

I would suggest that the answer to this is that the Leadership, the Councillors and the senior officers have become tired, sclerotic and devoid of vision and, bluntly, have run out of ideas.

There are two ways forward. One is to explore the possibility of an Elected Mayor. A petition containing some 9,000 plus names would be sufficient to trigger a referendum on this matter. The only problem would be that, as in other areas, the Leader of the Council would probably finish up as Elected Mayor rather than say a prominent and successful entrepreneur and we would thus be no further forward.

The other way is for candidates from outside the three main parties to gain a foothold in the Council chamber. After all, every journey starts with one step.

The election of independent candidates would be ideal but there may also be the prospect of UKIP candidates being put forward in selected wards to break the log jam of traditional voting patterns.

However this may turn out, if the electors vote for the status quo, then I fear that the rot will continue and this once proud town will finish up on its knees and in the gutter.

Paul Richardson

Ripon Close

Little Lever.

Letters update - Bolton Council - Ship Ahoy! - 30th August 2013 (Not published)

Dear Sir,

Perhaps others amongst your readers might, like myself, have found it somewhat unseemly that a senior Councillor and former Mayor should lower the tone of a full Council meeting by indulging in personal abuse and likening certain other Councillors to characters in the Captain Pugwash cartoons.

If members of the public were to extend the same exercise to the whole body of Bolton Councillors, they would certainly find rich pickings amongst the cast of the Muppet Show.

Just for fun, I went online to do this and within minutes had come up with over half a dozen. I couldn’t go further because I was laughing so much.

Paul Richardson

Ripon Close

Little Lever.

Letters update. Our European Boulevard. 12th August 2013

Dear Sir,

Mr Ryder’s enthusiasm for the ‘fantastic’ news of the suggested European Boulevard in Newport St would be praiseworthy if the proposal was realistic in its aims.

He does well to mention the Church Wharf, Central St, Merchant Quarter and Odeon developments but without realizing that on the admission of the Leader of the Council and the Chief Executive, these projects are going nowhere anytime soon. The reason is simple – the Private Sector is unwilling to invest the kind of money required for these in Bolton given the decline in commercial activity and the lack of footfall in the town centre.

The artist’s impression seems to be relating to Newport St between the Town Hall and the Olympus Chippy.  The report suggests that the extent of refurbishment would be once again to re-do the flags, lamp posts, street furniture and the like. £9m seems a bit steep for this but in any event none of this addresses the real problem of the lack of variety and quality of the retail offer located there.

There is no point in promenading up and down the Boulevard if there’s nowt worth buying.

All this also ignores the semi-derelict stretches of property at the Trinity St end of Bradshawgate, the former FADS and Gregory & Porritts stores on Great Moor St or the poor quality of the buildings at the Station end of Newport St. These are the things that people would see before they got to this new Boulevard and are much more worthy of money being spent on them.

The Greater Manchester Planning & Housing Commission apparently envisages Bolton as the main hub for office accommodation. Apart from wondering what the heck this has got to do with Greater Manchester, we’ve already got more empty offices than you can shake a stick at.

The ‘piece de resistance’ of this article was the Market Place manager getting excited about the ‘key role’ that the Centre would have in this plan. If he wants to have a key role, he should bite the bullet and change it back into what it used to be.

No, I’m sorry Mr Ryder, this is another load of expensive old tosh piled on top of all the previous expensive old tosh we’ve been regaled with.

Having said all that, I suppose it keeps the Development and Regeneration Department busy persuading us that the Emperor is indeed wearing some clothes.

If any or all of this comes to fruition in the next five or even ten years, I will gladly show my backside on the Town Hall steps (If it’s still there)

Paul Richardson

Ripon Close

Little Lever.

Letters update - Smoking Shelters - 6th July 2013 (Not published)

Dear Sir,

Predictably, the issue of smoking shelters at the Royal Bolton Hospital has, together with other matters at the hospital, descended into farce.

This stems from the original decision to ban smoking on the whole of the hospital site some five years ago. This ban last a fortnight until the powers that be discovered that it was illegal apart from being unenforceable.

The subsequent removal of the smoking shelters inevitably resulted in patients and visitors alike huddling round the main entrance producing a cloud of tobacco smoke that everybody else had to fight their way through.

The eminently sensible decision to re-instate the shelters away from the entrance would have solved this and allowed the smokers to poison each other to their hearts content without offending or affecting the purer living individuals who don’t smoke.

But NO!  The hairs were up on the necks of the fascist anti-smoking brigade. From the Council downwards the loins were girded, the placards written. ‘We know what’s best for you!’ ‘Off with their heads!’ ‘To the gallows!

Net result – their will be no smoking shelters. Back to the status quo.

Happy passive smoking everybody.

Paul Richardson

Ripon Close

Little Lever.

Letters update - Bolton is an Asylum Dispersal Centre - 6th July 2013

Dear Sir,

I, and no doubt others, was taken aback to discover that Bolton is designated an ‘Asylum Dispersal Area’. Apparently the Council signed up to this scheme as far back as 2004.

Putting aside the no doubt charitable motives behind this decision, it does appear to me to be strange in view of the much publicized degree of deprivation that existed in the Borough at that time – a situation which apparently still remains.

It is clear to me that this designation refers to Asylum Seekers who, by the very definition, are not allowed to work or contribute to the local economy in any way.

Following your article, many of the published remarks seem to assume that the report refers to immigration in general and their defensive remarks reflect this.

Sean Harriss remarks on the co-ordinated efforts made to ensure that new communities integrate successfully. I don’t think that integration is the problem. I think the problem is money.

My point is that there are necessarily additional cost implications for Housing Benefit, Council Tax Benefit, Education, Translation services and NHS provision etc just at a time when financial constraints mean that these areas just cannot afford it.

Perhaps it is time for the Council to ‘join out’ of this scheme in order to alleviate these additional and unnecessary pressures and let other richer and less deprived areas take our place.

Paul Richardson

Ripon Close

Little Lever.