Historical Factoids 4:

[Mal]

Just before I post this better explain I was facing several attempts to get my page shut down!!!!!!!

 

Better hurry up and get another posting while I still can!

Still back in the late 1990’s Wansbeck District Council decided they would stop bus tokens for our pensioners. This in an effort to save around £100,000 out of their annual budget.

This was met with disbelief and distress by many of our older members in our community because they had mostly supported and voted for the very people who made that decision.

The Bedlingtonshire Chamber of Trade was asked by pension group leaders for help. We agreed and put up their posters in most of the shops advertising the next councillor surgery, which was to be held at our community centre.

I was almost immediately ‘visited’ in the shop I had then by one of our local councillors who told me to get those posters taken down, or else! Things started to get heated after I told him that wasn’t going to happen! I suggested he went back outside get in his car, have a cigarette and calm down because I could just see the front page of next week’s News Post Leader which would feature a brawl between a councillor and a shop keeper on Glebe Road!

He did but came back in to again threaten, then coerce, then tell me about a lucrative part time job that might be coming up! I told him the posters stayed up!

On the evening of the councillor’s surgery around 400 pensioners turned up to ask for an explanation. The councillors, both WDC and NCC, were inside and locked the doors allowing no one inside. After arguing through the locked doors they relented and opened the doors to let everyone upstairs into the concert room.

All councillors apart from two left by the back door and when everyone was assembled upstairs one of them did a runner! So to at least give some credit one fronted the ‘meeting’.

First he attacked the bus company saying this was their idea. ‘Unfortunately’ I was standing next to the local area manager for the bus company who told everyone who he was and that wasn’t their idea at all!

Next the Chamber of Trade came in for some stick and I said if you try that again I’ll drop a nuclear bomb right in the middle of this room!

The pensioners made their feeling known in no uncertain terms!

What I never said because I didn’t want to further enflame the situation was that I had looked at the WDC budget and there was one item of expenditure which had received a healthy increase, their own entertainment budget, which they had increased to something like £240K I think it was! So they had cut funding to pensioners to save £100K while at the same time increased their own entertainment budget to more than double that!

With the whole debacle up in the air we held meetings with the bus management and we came up with what seemed a perfectly reasonable solution. That was taken back to the council who then claimed they had sorted it all out and would be running this scheme from now on. This scheme was so effective it was adopted, or elements in it, nationally and we can still see it in operation today!

When the dust had settled the Chamber of Trade received a letter from the Chief Executive of Wansbeck District Council telling us we were being taken to court for endangering the lives of pensioners? It seems the maximum capacity for the community centre had been breached and we were getting the blame?

I prepared a legal team to defend the action, which in their opinion was absolute horse XXXX, but my deputy chair and Finance officer at the CoT went across to meet with the CeO of the council and said they took the finger wagging in his office to put that to bed. They told me that they had never said anything to me because the thought of putting two explosive characters in the same room might have resulted in even more angst!

I believe it’s quite an achievement being chair of the Chamber of Trade for two years and having two different Chief Executives of the local council threaten legal action over principled stances each year!

Just as an addendum:

I had run a business in Bedlington for around 18years when this stuff started happening and I had one visit off Trading Standards in all that time. When these things were going on I had visits almost monthly and the stuff I was ordered to put right……..my shelves were wrong, the floor covering looked worn, the measure I used wasn’t approved…………..the list of petty stuff just went on and on. I eventually told them to go back to whoever had sent them and tell him I won’t be intimidated and if he wanted to carry on I’ll go to the press and really start naming names and bringing skeletons out of closets! I was left alone for a while after that!