Councillor Robinson - Diary of a County Councillor.

[Malcolm Robinson]

This is going to be a diary of my time as County Councillor for the Bedlington West ward. It will be a warts and all journey and I will be as honest and candid as I possibly can be, given that some of the things I will have to do will be overseen by confidentiality clauses because of one reason or another. Already had one which I can’t really mention in detail, that being the departure of the Chef Executive of the council.

Anyway having never ventured into this writing realm before I have been advised to write a short bio.

I ran a business in Bedlington for 20 odd years and in the late 90’s took over as chair of the Bedlingtonshire Chamber of Trade. During the next 2 years we built that into the largest CoT in the North East and pressed for better partnership working with local and regional government. One was much easier to attain than the other! Wansbeck District Council which was our local council was 100% Labour members in those days and for some reason best known to themselves looked at us as the enemy? This was apparent in many ways, probably the most recognisable was when WDC reneged on its commitment for a Xmas lighting competition between the major towns and in the end took lighting displays which Bedlington residents had bought as extra displays to brighten up our town and put them up in Ashington! I had to be physically restrained that day having ran events and been gunged in green ‘yak’ to raise money for the Bedlington Xmas Lights appeal only to see it disappear over the Stakeford Bridge!

Many stories about those times suffice it to say the newspapers called our committee the Bedlington Fairy Godmothers and WDC…..Scrooge!

In the two years I ran the CoT I was threatened with court action by two different chief executives of Wansbeck District Council, both times I told them I would welcome the chance to counter-sue and both times their supposedly rock solid cases were dismissed before any official legal proceedings. Once was over the extra Bedlington Xmas lights when I advised the Bedlington Lights committee not to pay the extortionate bill what had been presented to them by WDC and the other time was when WDC decided to take away concessionary fares for pensioners on public transport and the CoT did what it could to support them in that fight. That plain fact was the WDC was 100% Labour councillors at the time and they wanted to save the £160K cost of bus passes for the elderly. It did seem a lot of money but in the same budget they wanted to slash that out, they INCREASED their own entertainment allowances to £240K! I was starting to get my eyes opened for me!

I also put Bedlington on the Front page of the Sunday Sun and some nationals too. I got NASA to put a “Welcome to Bedlington” invite on the Mars landing vehicle and wrote up a humorous piece for the press saying any Martians would get discount rates on car, TV’s, clothes, food etc when they visited Bedlington. BBC and ITV ran the story as did all the broadsheets and tabloids. What I wasn’t prepared for was the radio and TV interest and I did interviews in places as far apart and South Africa and Canada, North America and Germany, France and the United Arab Emirates. The thing went viral and WDC was extremely noticeable by its absence. I didn’t have that much trouble with WDC after that?
Moving on and after returning from a 10 year sabbatical in France I again got myself involved in community issues. WDC had been dissolved and replaced by Northumberland County Council even though that was against the wishes of 52% of the people in a referendum! No change there then!

So all of a sudden Bedlington which had always played second fiddle to Ashington in Wansbeck Council was now not even on the radar being part of the much larger county authority. One of NCC’s first actions was to sequestrate the £500K the members of the Bedlingtonshire Golf Club had paid to buy out the council from their golf club and which was supposed to be ring-fenced for a Bedlington capital project. Its second order of business in very short order it seemed was to close our community centre! This was something I again felt strongly about and with some friends set up the Bedlingtonshire Development Trust, a charitable organisation created to put in an asset transfer bid to save our community centre from going the same way as the Golf Club monies!
That done and being the only organisation to go correctly through the whole process, including submitting a 20 odd page fully costed business plan, it was a bit of a shock when the Centre was awarded to the Town Council which had never really taken part in the asset transfer process. Course the Mayor and deputy Mayor at that time were also NCC councillors, one being secretary to the executive and the other being Civic Head or part of the team that decided who got the Community Centre. Just to add insult to injury I was asked to attend a meeting with the Mayor and his cronies where he asked for the Trust’s business plan! Dear God these people have no shame and I hope there is a picture building up here!

So with a fully legitimate Development Trust the decision had to be made whether to wind it up or see what we could do with it. We decided on the latter and readers can see for themselves what we got up to over the next few years.
http://bdt.bedlington.co.uk

From the Bedlington Terrier seats to enterprise lessons for youngsters, from putting in new easier access gateways to the community allotment to paying for Xmas lunches for our seniors, from buying expensive kit for Mind Active to putting on professional entertainment for our seniors, the Trust has integrated itself quite strongly into our community and delivered some really excellent projects.

Four years ago I stood for County Council and Town Council as an independent, basically against the same person. Whilst the majority of people gave me their trust and elected me to the Town Council they elected another political appointee, this time a Labour one, as their county council representative. I congratulated him at the count and said he had an open field to get something moving in the Town and I would help as much as possible. Over the next 4 years he earned himself the nickname the ‘Invisible Man’ because he was hardly seen in the Town never mind anything else. That made my mind up to stand again!

As for my time as Town Councillor. The first two years were made up of infighting as the Labour group tried to lay the law down through their majority vote. Wouldn’t have been so bad but what was proposed by them and carried was absolutely nuts and in my view contrary to the benefit of the Town. For the last two years I chaired the council and anyone can go to the WBTC web site (http://westbedlington.org.uk ) and see for themselves the transformation which took place.