Parking at Lockwood - Examiner article 6/7/12

Councillor Cooper at Victoria Road, Lockwood

COUNCILLORS are campaigning for residents near the new Kirklees College building to have parking permits.

Green Party councillors fear parking chaos on residential streets in Lockwood when the new building opens next year.

Clr Andrew Cooper, leader of the Greens on Kirklees Council, is organising a petition calling for action.
Kirklees College is currently building a new £74 million campus off Chapel Hill on the edge of the town centre.

Completion of the new building has been delayed with the September opening date now put back to January.

The new campus, which replaces the college building in New North Road, will cater for thousands of students and Clr Cooper said: “No doubt parking will be at a premium.

“This is bound to put extra pressure on residential streets in the surrounding area.”

Streets in and around Victoria Road, Lockwood Road and Rashcliffe Hill Road will be included in the bid for residents-only permits.

Clr Cooper (Newsome) said there were some problems already and the situation would only get worse when the college opened.

“Victoria Road is already busy and there are a lot of terraced properties which don’t have driveways for the most part,” he said. “As a consequence it’s going to get fairly congested.

“Kirklees Council has been very supportive of Kirklees College and it should recognise the impact of this development on local residents.”

Clr Cooper added: “The council may see this as an additional cost – and yes it is – but it is a natural consequence of the new Kirklees College site and it is something the council cannot ignore.”

The Greens plan to submit the petition and a formal request to the council shortly.

Clr Cooper added: “The delay to the opening of the new college gives us an opportunity to resolve this and we intend to speak to the council’s Cabinet about it.”

Last year the council attempted to introduce a £30 charge for parking permits but backed down after an outcry. The move would have raised £260,000 for the austerity-hit local authority.

Pics of River Holme at Armitage Bridge

I nipped down to Armitage Bridge to see what was happening with the river levels at around 6.30pm this evening. The river was only a few feet from the top of the boundary wall but thankfully the rains have stopped for a bit. Dean Brook on Dean Brook Road seemed to be flowing well with little debris so all seems well set for the Monkey Fest tomorrow and Sunday. Go along and soak up the real ale at the Monkey Club!

Return of the Zombie Posterboards

Rehman Remains

Regular readers of my blog may remember my posting on the 3rd June last year entitled 'Zombie Posterboards' which was about posterboards which remain on lamp posts (or in that instance a telegraph pole) long past their useful life and indeed past the time they are allowed to be up there by Kirklees Council. So here on the 4th July is a photo I took today of another zombie board somewhere in Newsome Ward.

By the way I can recommend, 'The Walking Dead' on Channel 5 at 10pm on Mondays definitely worth catching up with.

Greens Clean Up!

Last Sunday morning we carried out one of our Green Party volunteer clean ups focussing on the cat steps from Primrose Hill to Damside/Queens Mill Road.. The usual joy of picking up smelly rubbish but its worth it to see an area really improved.

Green travels on plane shock!

I love flying on planes. It’s the whole thing. The airport and anticipation of the flight, the flight itself and the feeling when you realise you have left the ground somehow defeating (if not exactly defying) gravity and coming into land at somewhere strange and exotic. Part of this fascination I’m sure comes from the fact that I travel on a plane once in a blue moon and then it is related to work.  So for the first time in 5 years I hurtled into the wild blue yonder from Manchester Airport on my way to a seminar in Dusseldorf for UK Trade and Industry. As a kid I was an avid watcher of all the Gerry Anderson stuff, Thunderbirds, Space 1999 all that sort of thing so all the hardware, the planes, the technology hits all those futuristic buttons that I like.  Funnily enough my (would have been) Father in Law, who is sadly no longer with us, worked with Gerry Anderson as a cameraman on UFO and Captain Scarlet. He told me, in what was sadly our only conversation, about his bemusement at all the strange Sci-Fi geeks who used to go through the bins at Century 21 studios in the 70s looking for cast off models of spacecraft. “Did they get anything good?” I remember asking enthusiastically and rather giving the game away regarding my own geekiness.

The environmental impact of air travel is now well known and completely disastrous as far as carbon emissions are concerned. I don’t believe air travel should be completely banned but it should have to play its part in reducing global carbon emissions and not be allowed to expand unchecked. Of course I checked out the rail alternative to Dusseldorf and it added another couple of days onto the travel arrangements and so I had to give it a miss. If it was a regular thing I’d probably work it into my work schedule. 

Manchester Airport seemed keen to display its environmental credentials. Top of the range hybrid diesel buses to transport you to and from the car parks (I got the train there), interactive environmental displays greet you on arrival from the train station and there are prominent recycling points and information. This is of course just scratching the surface of the environmental impact of air travel and flights can quickly negate a lot of positive work done to reduce carbon emissions through conservation and use of renewable energy.  This is why we have characters like Richard Branson trying to find ‘techno fixes’ such as bio fuels to power his planes.  These are very unlikely to be a realistic resource given the many pulls there will be on truly sustainable biofuels for road transport etc. Though I don’t share completely the line of the ‘no bio-fuels at all’ lobby I think it would be wrong to plough on with biofuel production without any fundamental changes in the amount of air travel we need. It is not a form of ‘growth’ that can go into the stratosphere forever.

Here's the first ever episode of UFO. Produced in 1970 set in the far off time of 1980 when we would all be wearing silver suits and living on the moon. Mike Rainer my wife's late father is credited on later episodes.

LGA Environment and Housing Board Report – June 2012

Flytipping on farmland

This Environment and Housing Board was in Birmingham to coincide with the LGA Annual Conference. It was half the cost of travel to London which I was pleased about. I suggested they held some meetings in Huddersfield – a nice central location.

The revised Memorandum of Understanding between the Department of Energy and Climate Change and the Local Government Association was up for discussion. There had been concern that DECC had on occasions implemented relevant policies (such as changes to Feed In Tariffs) with little or no consultation with Local Authorities. I made 2 contributions on the proposed shared statement between DECC and LGA. One to acknowledge that Councils had been the instigators of many of the leading energy efficiency projects that have occurred in recent years and that it is they and not central government that have the expertise and experience to deliver action on climate change.. Another point I made was that simply reducing local authority estate emissions on its own was not enough. If this was achieved simply through the sale of old energy inefficient buildings this and not through improvements to the existing stock this would not necessarily mean any reductions in carbon emissions in the area just a transfer of those emissions from the public sector to the private sector.

DEFRA are to hold a Flytipping Summit in July. One proposal on their agenda is to encourage Councils to exempt farmers from costs for disposing of flytipped materials. This proposal is fraught with difficulties. A small minority of unscrupulous farmers could effectively run illicit waste disposal businesses at no cost to themselves. There is also the question as to why should we exempt farmers as opposed to any other private landowner and why should cash strapped local authorities shoulder the cost of disposing of this waste. We should be focussing on the problem of flytipping not letting one particular group off the costs of paying for it. This proposal from DEFRA looks like an unworkable non starter.

The ongoing welfare reforms was another contentious issue on the agenda. The proposed benefits cap, the size criteria for under occupied rented housing and benefit payments no longer go to private landlords but straight to tenants all seem designed to make life more difficult for those on low incomes and to generate more homeless families and suffering. Government seems to have developed these policies  believing there is a mass availability of alternative cheap accommodation in other areas and that households would be able  to move many miles to  find a job in another area with cheaper accommodation.  The broad thrust of this was that households in London and the South East would move from the overcrowded and expensive south to the cheaper North where there are apparently lots of jobs. Clearly  a policy not in any way related to the real world.

I informed the meeting that I had been in touch with Councillors in Calderdale asking for feedback on issues arising from the recent floods  in my capacity as the Chair of the LGA’s Inland Flood Risk Working Group. Todmorden, Mytholmroyd and Hebden Bridge were badly affected by the recent floods and I am keen to ensure our contacts with DEFRA on flooding issues are informed by real life experiences from people and communities affected.

Working with Independents

Terry, Charles and Edgar - The Valley Independents

The Green Party forming a group on Kirklees Council with the Valley Independents has taken us up to 8 Councillors and we are now officially recognised as a 'major group' on the Council. The threshold of what constitutes a 'major group' was set at 7 in around 2003 by the larger groups and I always thought that this was designed to exclude the Green Party. At the time we were close to winning Kirkburton (and remained 'close' till 2007) so winning 6 seats for the Greens seemed to be reasonable in a just a few years but getting to 7 might take a bit more time. So I don't think the 7 seat threshold was just plucked out of the air, it was designed to preserve the power of the larger groups and the support they were able to call upon.

It would be wrong however to think that the Green Party working with the Valley Independents is simply a marraige of convenience. I do know that the term 'Independent' can cover a range of political views. My Grandad, on my mothers side, was an Independent Councillor in Newcastle under Lyme and he was a Daily Express reader with views probably not too distinguishable from a Conservative. Though we have worked with Conservatives on Kirklees in the past it would  be totally inconceivable for us to feel comfortable working in a group with them or people who to all intents and purposes were Conservative in all but name. The Independent Group leader Terry Lyons had been a Labour Party member and Edgar Holroyd-Doveton (who has his own blog) is a former member of the Green Party before he moved to Kirklees. So we were not dealing with any 'Con-dependents' here.

We spent the best part of the last year working together on the budget and other issues. So we have built trust and dialogue to better understand where we were both coming from. We both rejected the 'Party whipping system' and therefore the use of 'Party discipline' on dissenting members. A respect for difference of opinion was shared and therefore if on occasions we disagreed it would not necessarily be a huge issue. Consensus, mutual respect and leadership by consent, as opposed to coercion, were at the heart of this partnership. Following the local elections when the Greens won in Kirkburton and the Independents in Holme Valley North this took us over the magic 7 threshold with 8 Councillors. Another thing that bound us together was our shared experience of being elected largely through our own efforts regardless of the national swings to and from the larger parties. It makes getting elected harder but once you're there you should be more resilient to the ups and downs which effect the larger parties.

 The 3 wards we each represent share a common boundary so over a wide area of Kirklees  people are now used to electing representatives who are not party of the big 3 parties.Providing real choices for people is important and showing they are not constrained by traditional parties is empowering to communities freeing them from the paternalism which often characterises the larger parties.