Mal

In my ‘historical factoids’ series, I mentioned being told Bedlington doesn’t warrant any major investment. I’ve been trying to figure out where I saw that being justified and I’ve just been reminded of this beauty! So a deep dive and analysis into Northumberland High Streets up and down the County and we see this as an assessment for Bedlington. This was 2011 and while times have changed, indeed high streets up and down the country have changed dramatically; we can see one of the things being used to justify our continued lack of investment from one administration after another over the years. I’ll leave readers to draw their own conclusions………

Local Area Councils (LACs) Had our LAC last night and I raised questions about Fix My Street, the impending NCC budget and what exactly are the “‘innovative solutions for library facilities in Bedlington?” Back in 2016 when the current administration took over at NCC they decided they wanted LAC meetings instead of the old Area Meetings. The old Area meetings were held once a month at different venues with the North, West and South/East each having their own version. We were in with Ashington, Blyth Cramlington etc. and I recall even going to Lynmouth a few times for meetings. As a member of the public I attended just about all of these along with a couple of friends and we were able to speak directly to high ranking NCC officers as well as the main local political players. The new administration decided they wanted Local Area Councils instead and we were put in with Cramlington and Seaton Valley. The Sleekburn ward was put in with Ashington/ Blyth and that caused some consternation at the time. These new constructs were to have decision making powers and budgets over localised issues as well as some regeneration issues and budgets. Given that and the fact that for once we weren’t going to be under Ashington meant I was all for them! I was called out for ‘allowing Bedlington to be broken up’ but in reality that had already happened with the creation of the 3 parish councils and Area meetings were just talking shops anyway with very limited relevance, as anyone who attended them would know! What has transpired was what I said last night. Basically we were sold a pup and the LAC’s have never had any decision making powers, other than a few planning applications, and they have never had budgets! As well as those little matters to think about they don’t really have any democratic legitimacy so what we get are endless presentations to note! I get wrong for saying ours is more akin to a Cramlington Town Council meeting give their never-ending presentations and even though I do make myself heard at these meetings I haven’t changed my mind! When rebuked for what I was saying last night I pointed out the public gallery…….not a single person had sat through the whole meeting, and quite a few councillors had joined them too, heading for the door! So as they are, I consider them basically irrelevant, apart from some local interest presentations and I have suggested they become much more public friendly and forward facing and embrace that as a way forward. No doubt we will see a public consultation about them soon enough…………

I have always believed we need to allow our youngsters to have a voice and we should listen to what they have to say. That means they need to be aware of what’s going on so they can make informed decisions. Back in the 90’s I asked the ones hanging around the market place what they wanted and they told me just somewhere safe, warm and somewhere they could call their own. Didn’t sound unreasonable to me so I took that message to the District Council through the then Town Forum meetings. Like so many other Bedlington orientated requests it fell on deaf ears! When I became a town councillor and eventually chair of the Town Council I wanted to include our youngsters and even tried to set up a youth council as part of the Town Council so their voice could be heard. I also did sessions with some of youngsters trying to explain how the various councils work and which one did which service delivery. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-hKIe2Z19V8 When I became a County Councillor I took some up to County Hall as part of Democracy week so they could have first-hand experience of what went on up there. I have always tried to include our youngsters and get something for them. Now they, as well as others, have had a huge toll taken during Covid so it’s even more essential to do right by them! The first battle on that front I won and we will soon see the new PlayZone soon at West Lea. Lots more needed in that particular war of course!

It’s not been all doom and gloom of course there are some enjoyable things to mention. I worked with the group that put on the Bedlington Street Fair back in the 1990’s and that was really successful with everyone saying how much they enjoyed it. For whatever reason that stopped in the early 2000’s and when I became chair of the Town Council it was something I wanted to bring back into the annual calendar for the Town. I think I got a budget of around d £15K and promised to get it sorted. Again working with some great people we managed not only to bring it in under budget but the income it produced by selling space to the venders meant I could put on other events like an enhanced Xmas light switch on, dog show and support the revamped Bedlington Picnic. 2015 was the first year we did it and it was a huge success. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Ubqxpn9AZY The following year we wanted to enlarge it and made it a two day event 2015 had been a great event, 2016 was going to be even better! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IRRuL85jzDM The new Bedlington Picnic was held at Attlee Park and the kiddies especially enjoyed that one. We held the dog show at one end of the 20 Acres and we had dogs from all over being entered into the competitions. After being elected to the County Council I wanted to use Plessey Woods Country Park for some events, just to get people down there and show them what a great facility we have on our doorstep. The first one was a classical…… https://www.facebook.com/100057586923534/videos/594982757700108 https://www.facebook.com/100057586923534/videos/430688474219411 Then it was a Superhero’s one for the Kids……… https://www.facebook.com/100057586923534/videos/808093089689613 I even pulled one off for the Queens Platinum Jubilee Day, this was a part of it……..even raffling Pooh Bear to give to our foodbanks. https://www.facebook.com/100057586923534/videos/313350500979595 https://www.facebook.com/100057586923534/videos/1202791570523818 https://www.facebook.com/100057586923534/videos/2045314589000041 Even the little ones got in on the act…………. https://www.facebook.com/100057586923534/videos/713038763272309 We even did a Santa Tour just before Xmas… https://www.facebook.com/100057586923534/videos/3985970814767804 So some of the stuff we have seen over the last few years.

The sorry saga of the Hartford Hall gates. These Grade 11* listed gates were made by the world leading makers Coalbrookdale for the Vienna Exhibition in 1873 to demonstrate their craftsmanship. Anecdotally I was told you can even see the fingerprints on the cast hands included in the design of these gates, a feat which cannot be reproduced even today! It was agreed as part of the renovations to Hartford Hall that these gates would be renovated and English Heritage became involved. They even gave a grant towards the renovations and insisted there was only one place in England that could be trusted with this significant renovation project. The gates were dismantled and shipped off to the specialist down in Yorkshire. Things now take a turn for the worse! During the renovation project the developer went bust and the Administrator was called in. The Administrator sequestered all monies in the account including the grant funding for these gates and paid out debtors of the company. So the money disappeared and the gates which had been started were now left languishing somewhere in Yorkshire. There were many calls for their reinstatement and I decided to do a bit of digging myself. I found out where they had been shipped off to and rang the company up to find out what was going on. I was told there was an outstanding bill for work done, about 1/3rd, and until that was paid the gates remained, never mind about getting them finished. After making more ‘noises’ about them over the next few years and a BBC Inside Blog about them I found out they had been moved and were actually in the old fire station at Morpeth. So I presumed that part bill had been paid and moves were afoot to get them sorted? Asking about them now and I was told they had been moved again, where I wasn’t allowed to know, but moves were afoot to get something done with them. I persisted and eventually I received a phone call to tell me they were in the possession of NCC (good) they would be renovated (great) they would probably be encased in glass or plastic to stop any further degeneration (great) and would be on public display (great!). There was even a cost estimate of around £500K and I was asked to help find that money. I agreed but then asked where exactly would they be displayed, even suggesting several places in Bedlington where I thought they might work. I was told they had to be displayed in…….Ashington? Ehhh! Why was never explained and after a lengthy heated argument I said I wouldn’t be helping them to see them end up in Ashington, which I felt would be yet another slap in the face for Bedlington! So that’s the tale of woe yet again but as far as I know NCC have them stashed somewhere and that £500K estimate could well be in excess of £750K now, never mind where they might end up! (As an addendum to this one.........The Gates are now in safe storage in a NCC depot where they are being kept as dry and moisture proof as possible. )

Back in the early 1990’s Northumberland County Council came up with an idea to regenerate the dilapidate Hartford Hall. This was well before it became a residential area. The idea was to turn some of it into the clubhouse for the Wansbeck District Council owned Golf Club (at that time it was 100% owned by WDC), build some into a hotel complex and the main part into a Regional sporting rehabilitation centre. It was previously used by the Coal Board as a recuperation centre. I went along to one of the meetings to hear what the plans were and asked a question that had been bothering me for some time. “Will this mean we get a sign post on the A1, the main vehicular arterial route through the county, to Bedlington?” The answer, NO Bedlington isn’t seen as a destination Town. I asked what on earth was it seen as then? “It’s seen as just somewhere you pass through to get to somewhere else.” I don’t think that thought process has changed to this day! Hartford Hall was to be a £20M investment by NCC and they even wanted to give themselves planning permission to do it. That fell foul of the planning Laws and they were told they couldn’t do that! The ill thought out plan fell to bits after that in pretty short order, especially when the Golf Club members said they were against it and wanted their clubhouse to remain where it is. So NCC, who were in for about £1.5M at that time, not including any officer time, sold to to a developer for about £2M and claimed they had made a profit on the whole transaction! What happened next robbed us of one of the most important bits of Bedlington Heritage namely the Hartford Hall gates!

One enduring question, and I’ve asked it many many times myself, why has the needs of Bedlington been ignored for so long? First under Wansbeck District Council and then latterly under Northumberland County Council. I don’t know the answer and I’ve never had that question answered, but we can delve a little under various blankets. Back in the day we had Bedlingtonshire Urban District Council. A council many look back on fondly for one reason or another but principally because we were in charge of our own affairs. We then had the Local government Act 1972 and in 1974 Ashington, Bedlington and Newbiggin became Wansbeck District Council. I was told that BUDC was given a choice to go that way or form one with Cramlington, an emerging newish Town at the time with huge commercial infrastructure. I know which way I would have gone! So again by word of mouth by people there at the time, one of the first decisions made by WDC was to make Ashington the ceremonial and commercial head of this new entity. By that very act I would argue it relegated Bedlington into at best second place if not third place in the pecking order of WDC! As far as I could see that continued throughout the life of WDC, the council that was once described as “making decisions in smoke filled rooms behind closed doors!” We then again had the structural changes to local government in 2009 which saw the creation of Northumberland County Council as a Unitary Authority and I’ve already written a piece about that. As I said at the time, playing third fiddle under Wansbeck District Council would seem a pipe dream now as so many other towns and villages were added to the list to compete with. I now have to delve into the heady world of politics in search of the answer. We saw WDC 100% controlled by a single political party. As I have already written about some of the decisions they made were unbelievable to me! I think out of 42 councillors there 19 were from Bedlingtonshire. I even said to one or two if you get your act together you could force WDC to invest this side of the Stakeford Bridge, you have nearly 50% of the votes so it wouldn’t take much to push something through. I was laughed at and told it didn’t work like that. Took some time to find out how it did work and as far as I could see it was about furthering the interests of a political party not the people who they were supposed to be working for. That is the same across all political parties BTW and anyone can see it time and time again when their ethereal Whips impose control on voting. The voting patterns in Bedlington were taken for granted and so why give yourself work when the elections were a forgone conclusion. Ramping that up to a county level and we saw the same and I see it at just about every full council meeting to this day. That’s a cycle we have to break and we made a good start by electing some independent councillors which believe me sent ripples throughout the political establishment! Just to demonstrate, and it’s plain to see, at most if not all major NCC meetings it’s the independent councillors asking the really ‘difficult’ questions. As far as I can see the only way to get decisions based on merit instead of political expediency is to elect more independent councillors, at least we can vote with our conscience instead of being told how to vote on certain issues! I now want to look at budgets and how they work. The council has, by law, to pass an annual balanced budget so if we see schemes included, like for the sake of argument the Bedlington Regeneration funding, which fail to get started in a year that funding is basically lost. There are options to keep it but essentially 99% of funding which falls into this category is lost. So we saw funding allocated to Bedlington of between £6-£12M over about 3 budgets. Each time failure to realise that project meant the funding was lost, that’s why it had to be reinserted into the next year’s budget. Covid finally stopped any major funding for Bedlington being included and by major I mean 10’s of millions. Bearing in mind that something approaching 90% of the NCC budget goes into the social side of things like adult and young people’s services, and with a large county like ours where towns up and down are equally screaming for investment it’s not hard to see pressures building up. It is easy to see why external funding for various projects is so necessary for NCC, like Levelling up funding, High Street funding, Borderlands etc. Whilst I understand the constraints I still cannot excuse the fact that Bedlington is only included in the smallest pot! That’s seems to me to be a mixture of political pressure and easy options. There are a few of my thoughts, if anyone can give me a definitive answer please do!

I’ve been asked about the Bedlingtonshire Development Trust and how it came about……so here goes. (Sorry this is going to be a long one…….) As a member of the public I had started to take an interest in local politics, even just to see why the needs of Bedlington had been ignored for so many years, and had been told to look at forming a Development Trust if I wanted to be proactive. I went around each of the 3 local councils in Bedlingtonshire asking if they would be supportive, thinking a partnership approach would be the best way to go. Each said NO, not interested! That didn’t put me off. I was doing the research when NCC closed our community centre in, as they claimed, a cost cutting exercise. I knew a vehicle like a Development Trust could apply through the council’s asset transfer policy to take it over as other trusts had done with many other redundant buildings up and down the county. I was given the criteria for such a bid and went about putting a Trust board together. The main crux of what we needed to do was to submit a fully costed business plan so that’s what I did. The Trust was the only group who held an inspection of the building to ascertain the cost of repairs it needed. There had been no money spent of maintenance for years under Wansbeck District Council and even less under NCC, and when I saw the books they were even worse! I used this to negotiate a sum of money that would come with the building to see to its much needed repairs. Even the main electrical conduit into the building needed to be replaced, that should give some indication just how badly neglected it was. After quite some weeks of intense collaborative work I eventually produced a professional 21 page business plan which was submitted on the day all these bids had to be in. There were 3 interested parties and I had meetings with them asking if we could do this as a partnership. One said no way, that was the Lib Dem controlled Town Council, and the other said yes because they just wanted a very limited use which I was happy to agree. The bids were in and judged by the Lib Dem NCC Administration at County Hall. The Lib Dem controlled Town Council were awarded the community centre. Fair enough but as some of the details came out I was stunned! They had settled on considerably less than what I had negotiated for, regarding repairs to the building and hadn’t even submitted a business plan? It seems the Lib Dem Administration at County Hall, where the chair of our Town Council was secretary and so included in this meeting, had somehow judged the bids even though there had only been one joint one and awarded the centre to a group that hadn’t even taken part in the process? I was then summoned to a meeting with the Mayor and his deputy. I asked a colleague to come along as a witness because by now I was weary to say the least! The Mayor told me to hand over the business plan I had done because he had been told it was excellent. I couldn’t believe my ears I could only look at my colleague as he looked at me aghast. I quickly realised these people just didn’t have a clue; they had done no prep work, no research and had no costings for things like new heating systems etc. We walked away shaking our heads after replying, “No, you roll your plans out now!” So we had a fully functioning Trust with nothing to do might as well put it to work! As I’ve already reported we worked with an NCC officer to get the sports pavilion down at Gallagher Park. Next up was some self-promotion and this one was entered into an award by a large European Bank and made the last 10 before I had to cut it for exceptional reasons! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iqecpk6LpFk We were also working on a sports hall at Meadowdale School area with Bedlington Forum. We even got the feasibility money for it off a part of NCC, but just as we were about to pull the trigger and commission a national group to come in and pull it together we were told NCC would double to money but it had to include the whole of Bedlington, not just the Top End. We agreed and that was commissioned, little did we know what effect the proposed new school at Bedlington Station would have. A full professional report was produced after interviewing local sports groups, potential sports groups, councillors, NCC etc. and the conclusion……..”Whilst new sporting provision is needed in Bedlington we can’t ignore a £20M new school at Bedlington Station which will have a full range of up to date sporting provision. The best outcome would be to make sure these facilities are available for the community to use”. Course that £20M actually turned into nearly £10M and one of the first things to get the chop…….the big new multi-use sports centre and pitches! A much reduced offer was eventually built which spectacularly failed to meet any of our expectations. The Trust worked closely with Leading Link and again the first thing was sporting facilities: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C8qunOuVvCQ We also successfully applied for a Heritage grant to demonstrate our rich history. The project attracted a lot of praise off the Heritage people and we had to go down to Manchester and were applauded as one of the best projects of this kind in the country. We built an interactive trailer which was then ‘decorated’ with images of Bedlington history as well as thigs to do and Leading Link took it around the local schools explaining what each bit was about. We held a ‘junior’ Bedlington Picnic Day as well as producing some excellent videos. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fz6A9NLArEI What Bedlington’s about and where might it go………(We can dream!) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DtUAN4UKRhU Bedlington’s mining heritage: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-EZf2LS_vlc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i6i461yrGFA The Development Trust was asked to intervene time and time again in various issues. The Olympic Torch was coming to the county as part of the London 2012 Olympic games and guess where wasn’t listed as one of the Towns for it to go through, as per! Some pretty heated exchanges followed! I was eventually allowed to make a presentation, at Blyth, to the UK Sports Association guys overseeing this and set to work with Lyn Horton from Leading Link and Richard Wearmouth from the Salvation Army putting together the necessary event/safety plans etc. These national agency guys couldn’t have been more supportive and even squashed some of the stuff our local council raised! The day wasn’t the best as far as the weather went but over 5000 people lined our Front Street to watch the Torch pass through our Town! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fF9ZP8jOcy4 I was then asked to help with a little project for some of our disabled seniors. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S46ShD4M2wM The Trust also put on some entertainment for our seniors in the Salvation Army as well as getting the funding to help Mind Active purchased a bit of expensive equipment they had been after for some time. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ka-fhVgjXTs The Trust was by now working closely with several local charitable groups in fact the only ones that wouldn’t work with us were the ones with some councillor members! Several more projects followed but then I decided to stand for council and as I could see a clear prejudicial interest I resigned my Trust board membership. I would like to thank past and serving officers of the Trust for the support they always give to our Town. I was especially grateful when they gave so much to our struggling foodbanks, way before any group thought about doing that. Here is a radio snippet where I try and explain what the Development Trust is about. https://bedlington.uk/.../malcolm-robinson.../ Funnily enough, just as a post script, East Bedlington Parish Council have formed their own Development Trust very recently. Seems the circle has come right around…………….

I’ve been asked how the Gateway features came about? I’ll answer that along with the other things of the same ilk. I had started the Development Trust, as a private individual, when we tried to take over the Community Centre when the Lib Dem Administration at County Hall said they wanted rid of it. That tale in itself might be worth its own Factoid! Anyway we had a Development Trust and I thought why not put it to good use, even after not been able to take on the Community Centre. Like it or not Bedlington is world famous for its dogs so there seemed to me to be a USP at our disposal. Looking at Terrier designs I thought these would make great seats so I set about a design and a model to make sure they would work. Then I had to find the funding to make a prototype and did a Dragons Den type thing to get that. Its actually the 10 year anniversary for these seats! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q1ahZtXCx6o Then the unveiling: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XXBiT_B6OKc So I then had a seat and set about selling them to make money for the Development Trust. The seats we made had to be of a commercial quality so I could sell them to the likes of NCC etc. All the monies that we raised were handed over to the Salvation Army to pay for Xmas lunches for our seniors. In fact during Covid the Trust handed over most of any funding they had left for the foodbanks! I was then elected to the Town Council and at a meeting I had proposed doing some Gateway Features for the town because one of the main responsibilities for a Town Council is promotion. The ruling Labour group came up with an idea to have a pile of bricks and tiles as a feature while I proposed using our long history to find 4 features which identified with the town and install them at each of the four main roads into Bedlington. Again I was given that project to run to shut me up probably! Anyway I came up with our Coat of Arms, a Bedlington Terrier, St Cuthbert’s cross and the De Arnaud steam train, made in Bedlington and shipped out to Holland as their first locomotive. Lots of hassle but eventually I got these as the project. I even spoke to the director of the national train museum in Holland because they have a working replica of the De Arnaud and I wanted the exact dimensions so I could replicate it at scale. Also I had to do some detective work to find our ‘lost’ coat of arms but eventually speaking to the old BUDC engineer he had the plates! Now having the four designs I enlisted the help of the metal work guys to make them and fit them in place and what an excellent job they made! I use iron (Steel) as a nod to the famous Bedlington Iron Works of the past. I also wrote up brief histories on each to put in lecterns at each site so everyone would be aware of why these are there. There are some interesting stories attached to each really, especially the coat of arms. My tenure at the Town Council ended and these were never done. So we have the Terrier seats and now the Gateway Features you see around the Town. The large Terrier down at the bottom of Hartford Road is, as I predicted at the time, a famous stop off point for Terrier owners from all over the world so they can get their picture taken. With West Lea Cemetery being a Commonwealth War Graves site and as I was now the local councillor for it, I commissioned the anniversary commemorative plaque for the right-hand side of the entrance gate. After Covid I commissioned the ‘Thank You’ plaque at the other side. Both in metal and each quite obviously telling their own story. There are more designs coming but I’ll leave that for another day!

Good to see the new PlayZone at West Lea getting a mention and still shenanigans behind that! I was contacted by a friend who told me about these PlayZones and the fact that Northumberland were to get 12. No one seemed to know about this Sport England project. When I looked into it I was dismayed but not entirely shocked to see Bedlington wasn’t down to get one. I found out who was in charge and got on the phone! I was told I would need to satisfy a load of conditions to get us included. I got a list of those conditions and went through them one by one bringing in user groups, management group, community consultation and land ownership. The next phone call was met with stunned silence for a while but eventually we were taken seriously and not only did we become included in the Playzone project, because of the work I had done, we became the leading site for the first of these PlayZones. Have to say I couldn’t have done this myself without the help of people who were as fired up as I was about it and could see the potential, so many thinks for all the help. I think the officers were pleasantly surprised too with all this community buy in and the fact that whatever problems they threw our way were overcome. We have had to do specific interviews and eventually held a public consultation at Netherton Club. Next I was told the other Bedlington Councillors would have to back it, why Im not really sure because until that point no one else had been involved. Anyway a meeting was pulled together and other officers who were in charge of the likes of playing fields and green spaces attended. I sat at that meeting and said nothing for about 15 minutes while others said they wanted this in their wards, must have thought it was an early Xmas present. The suggestions were Gallagher Park, Dr Pit Park and the Town Centre. I was a bit taken aback given all the work I and others had put in, but hey ho. I was eventually ask what my feelings were as I had played no part in this meeting so far. I said I will explain why West Lea is the only place its going! Gallagher Park, I asked the officers who oversee it if they were going to do the work and put up the finance needed, they said no they couldn’t, strike one! Dr Pit Park, I said we all know the problems down there and this wouldn’t last 5 minutes, strike two! Town Centre, I said if this does go to the Town Centre Im walking away because this will be seen as the NCC contribution to the whole of Bedlington as far as leisure provision goes and while other Towns around see £20 odd million new sports centres we get £200K. It will be a PR disaster, strike three! The only one that stacks up and has done any work on the project, by the way, is my proposal for West Lea! One of the councillors said he would back my proposal if I backed his call for him getting the next one. I replied saying that is the difference between us, if this was your proposal I would be backing you unequivocally for the simple reason that it’s a substantial amount of funding coming into leisure provision in Bedlington! So West Lea it is! Now I have to say this is around £250K’s worth of investment into a fairly small scale leisure project but welcomed none the less. Should be getting started early in the New Year and hopefully opened for Easter. The planning permission has gone in. I’m even happier to see the likes of Ladies Netball getting behind it as future users. It’s about getting a bit of provision for the likes of new and underrepresented groups to use and enjoy so if anyone wants to start up a sporting group, say tennis, basketball etc. please get in touch. There is football provision already and I hope to see ladies soccer as well as youth soccer development working there and I’m sure there will be given the people behind that. (If anyone wants to start an over 50’s walking football club I’m up for it!)

Few more Cannylass! In the spirit of lost opportunities: We have a changing facility at West Lea football pitch which quite frankly isn’t up to purpose. I wanted to do something with it and thought why not try for something much better which has changing facilities within it instead of there just being this bomb shelter? I took advice and had several meetings there with different NCC officers who all agreed it should be a much better offer. I then spoke to most of not all of our local sports clubs, primarily football, and some sort of indoor facility was needed. I suggested an indoor 5 a side pitch, built to national standards so league matches could be played, but which could be used for other things too in the true sense of a small multi-use sports centre. I next spoke to Sport England to get the exact sizes needed so I knew it would fit and start getting a costing. Next I had on site meetings with manufacturers and installers of the type of building needed and even asked if a local school would do some picture art for the outside depicting sporting uses. So I had a quote for under £300K and after meeting with sports funders who all said they wouldn’t help I started lobbying the Leadership at NCC. Finally, blow me down with a feather, they agreed and even increased the funding to £500K because they told me not to skimp on anything. That extra funding would allow me to build bigger as well as all the fit out costs etc. With a bigger build I then started talking to private swimming pool operators to see if they would be interested in putting in a small starter pool so our kids could learn to swim in Bedlington, as had been the case at St Bennet’s. I didn’t want Active Northumberland anywhere near because this was to be a community owned project! I even had meetings about how it would be managed by the community. This was going too well! I was then told off the then CeO of NCC that it was a NCC project because it was in their budget and I just thought, couldn’t care less if you want the credit just build the dammed thing. I had a meeting with the officer put in charge and the first thing he said was “Bedlington doesn’t warrant this investment.” My reply was “That’s me and you falling out straightaway bonny lad!” Anyway after hearing nothing about it for several weeks I went to the then Leader of the Council to ask him to find out what was going on. The answer that came back that it was unaffordable??? I asked for the plans and projected costs of what they were talking about and neither myself nor the Leader of NCC could get an answer! When I did eventually see them they were for a 3 hall basketball courts at a cost of £3.5M? I blew my top at this point and was summoned to a meeting with the Chief Executive Officer of NCC, her deputy and the head of regeneration. I was told this was the only thing they would consider and the costs were too much. I agreed the costs were ridiculous but said that wasn’t what was wanted! After several tense quite explicit minutes I was told that the real reason was because the Town Centre project needed extra funding so this funding, I had secured, had to go there. In the spirit of the greater good I reluctantly agreed with the proviso that it went into some sort of leisure offer in the Town Centre. That was agreed by all parties! We all know what happened then………nothing and the money disappeared into thin air, as is what happens with annual budgets! I will never be as trusting, or possibly green, again!

Well that's about half of them............... There is one biggie left of course, Arch. We have seen where the company derived from and equally as interesting is the way the Labour Administration at NCC turbo charged it. It was worth about £30M when they took over and for some reason they began stuffing it full of assets and an almost limitless borrowing facility with around £300M. The way it had been set up though didn’t have any business acumen whatsoever to me. ‘Giving’ this company so much of our assets and lending it money at favourable interest rates, like it was going out of style, with only the obligation of paying interest on the actual money it received meant it’s never going to repay the original balances. At some point in the future it will have to clear those balances or refinance? BTW, NCC makes the spread between what they can borrow at, which is well below bank rates, and the interest rate they charge Arch. So at least there is a little tickle! However ramping up the company to the levels it reached and saying they wanted to triple that ‘investment’ was and is a recipe for disaster! I said that on my first election leaflet! That has now been recognised and is being dealt with, hopefully! It was also supposed to pay back cash dividends to NCC as its sole owner. I did see one such payment made to Active Northumberland at the time (£1M) , because Active was itself heading for financial disaster due to mismanagement under the same people. We all read the ‘indiscretions’ the Arch report noted, nepotism, financial irregularities, no proper controls in place etc, etc, etc. The final report was quite damming with all sorts of shenanigans mentioned, such as the Chief Executive selling his house at an inflated price to the company because he couldn’t sell it on the open market! How on earth there were no prosecutions bewilders me, but it’s hardly surprising the level of mistrust the general public have for politicians. I really don’t understand why any politician who is elected at set periods in time, so can be kicked out and lose all the control they might have, would dare to act in the way some of these people did and to allow such a ridiculous state of affairs. They must have realised it was all going to come out pretty quickly, all that needed to happen was to lose the next election, which they did, and that lit the fuse. Thank God it did or we might be in the same position as the other councils across the country declaring bankruptcy. The thing that really gets my goat is they while all this was going on, basically profligacy with public money behind the scenes; we saw cuts to NCC budgets like Adult Services and Children’s Services. I really don’t know how some people sleep on a night!

Bit of a side view but still illustrative I think. Gallagher Park Back in around 2010, I think it was, the Friends of Gallagher Park were trying to get some sort of facility down there. I asked the Chair of that group, George Webster, what it was they actually needed. He told me that they wanted to see some sort of toilet facilities down there because very young lads and lasses were having to use the bushes! I had started the Bedlingtonshire Development Trust and used that to open some doors in NCC. First I spoke to the woodlands officer and we came up with a scheme for the downhill mountain bike tracks. Once that was seen as a successful collaboration I was able to speak to and work with the NCC Green Spaces officer. I explained the problems and he agreed that was totally unsuitable. I suggested that instead of just trying to put some loos down there let’s try for a sports building which could have externally accessible toilets. He agreed and for some months we were at meetings trying to secure the funding needed, eventually we succeeded although at a much reduced level than what would eventually be needed! When I saw the costings coming back to us I thought they were unbelievable so I went out and had meetings with a director of a large building group in Newcastle. With his help I came up with a costed alternative for a large indoor training facility, exactly what the users needed down there. I took that to a meeting at Blyth with the head of what has become Active Northumberland and the NCC councillor who had leisure in her portfolio. I was told the Leader of NCC had said there was no appetite for a large build in Bedlington. I was flabbergasted, the professionally raised costings I had were around £300K, the cost of the small pavilion we see now at Gallagher Park, at that time were between £600-£700K. I think it ended up around £800K a lot of which was the cost to get an electrical supply down there. So it couldn’t have been the financial contribution that stopped it? There was the possibility of a lot of the playing fields down there being taken by a housing developer and we didn’t want that. We wanted to retain the open space and playing fields down there. I saw the Queen was looking to replicate one of her father’s projects and introduce some QE11 parks. I applied for Gallagher Park and we were successful in becoming a QE11 park. This meant it is protected as open green space so no development! Because of that I was asked to lead a community response to one of the awards the Fields in Trust group were doing. I entered us into the Best Loved Playing Field section and set about raising the support needed. Unbelievably we won and that award is at County Hall to this day!

That’s a few of the ‘big ticket’ items I have personal experience of, even back then just as a member of the public. Really shocked, saddened and disgusted in equal measures by a lot of it so I decided to stand myself for election. Given what I had seen there was no way I was going to join any of the political parties so I stood as an independent candidate for both the Town Council and NCC. I was successfully elected to the Town Council but the Labour candidate took the NCC seat I contested. The first year on the Town council was a real eye opener because I saw how the political parties really operated. The Town council was then made up of 5 labour members and 4 independents. Important decisions which should have been raised and debated at Town Council meetings in full view of the public were actually being made days before behind closed doors at political party meetings! I would watch 5 members vote before the proposal had been fully explained, never mind debated. Also in this first year the chair was ‘given’, by 5 votes to 4, to someone in recognition of his unwavering political support? I asked is this really the best we can come up with? So the council more or less drifted in the first year, I was given a project to shut me up after proposing it, probably thinking I would never be able to pull it off. That’s how we got the parking bays on Glebe Road to solve the problem of parking on both sides blocking access up and down that street. The next year we had a political protégée installed as chair and this time there wasn’t even the remotest disguise of democracy! Even the clerk resigned! Again to shut me up bleating on about what I saw as the crazy situation we had at the top of Attlee Bank for pedestrians, where they had to step out into the road to get back onto the footpath and then cross the road on the tight corner at the bottom of the bank, I was challenged to sort that out. I negotiated with NCC for permission to put a new path down to the Park but this time not going down the main road, going through the woods. I also priced the job up and found the NCC quote to be almost 3 times dearer than another quote I had. Took quite a bit of arguing but finally we got the job done for the reasonable amount and they made a decent job of it. During the monthly meetings some of the stuff that came up was absolutely ridiculous and 4 of us were constantly trying to get it changed. I had several official complaints about my behaviour lodged with the NCC Solicitor at the time and as far as I could see they were for having the audacity to vote and speak against certain proposals. So they always got their own way but for the life of me I can’t think of any really serious other improvements done that year. Members of the public were saying the same sort of things so in his wisdom the chair sent a letter to the press calling Bedlington residents nothing but whingers. At the very next meeting he had the police, out of sight in the council office, because about 200 people had turned up to have a go about his comments. This was a special meeting anyway because we picked a new chair for the next year. One of the Labour group on the Town Council had resigned and someone else had taken their place. We wondered how she was going to vote but we needed have worried she had seen for herself the behaviours on display at these meetings. The chair proposed himself, to thunderous disapproval from members of the public in the room, and other members proposed me. He even repeated some of the stuff he had said in the press article? At the vote one Labour councillor was seen to raise his hand to vote for me and another Labour councillor leaned over and pulled his hand down. This was called out by the newest member of the council and I believe videoed by a member of the public. So I was voted in as chair and immediately had to calm everyone down. I then spent months going through every line of expenditure so at the budget setting meetings I could ask councillors to justify each and every line! Some of the stuff in there was unbelievable, even down to excessive expenses claims! This produced something which no other ‘parish’ council had done; bring in a reduction to the tax charge every household pays. Not only that over the course of the two years I was in charge we put in two new play parks for our kids, one at West Lea and another at Meadowdale, put in new bus shelters throughout, painted the handrails around the Town, also the hardware such as litter bins, fitted larger and more litter bins…..the list goes on. One other thing we brought back was the Bedlington Fair day. I used the money that generated to pay for an enhanced Xmas light switch on show. We had calls from councils all over asking how on earth we had managed to do everything while still doing a reduction in the precept. Not hard when you have some good people around you! I think I also have the dubious award for the most complaints lodged against a sitting Chair, all off one political group, even a NCC councillor got in on the action! All dismissed as vexatious and time wasting. I even had a councillor knocking on my neighbour’s doors asking if they knew anything bad I had done???????? I must have really been a pain in their backside, so doing my ‘job’ properly then! This is what you are up against politically when you stand as an independent; everyone has a go at you. I had pretty juvenile comments and attacks against me on social media platforms and even had my social media account hacked. Never mind faint heart never won fair maiden!

Just by way of a brief addendum: Worth knowing how the wholly owned, by NCC, ‘arm’s length investment company’ came into being. If you read the bit about Wansbeck Life you will understand the absolute furore that pretty shambolic episode produced far and wide. When the news broke in the press damage limitation went into overdrive with one report to me saying he had never seen so many big shots all running into a meeting. This was when the Lib Dems were in control and they wanted to see the thing contained as much as anyone else, even though it was Wansbeck District Council who had initiated the explosion! The idea that all these local power brokers came up was that the assets of Wansbeck Life were to be transferred into another company called Arch. At that time, and according to that newspaper article, these assets were around £30M. So that was Arch at that time under the Lib Dems, mainly a property landlord. How it ramped up its asset base by 10 fold and became the centre of its own salacious renown will be another chapter………….. Just as a postscript……..I have always felt and said that these sorts of people should be held accountable for their actions. Just recently we have seen similar at NCC and I have said the same in fact I offered to start a public campaign asking everyone for a fiver so we had enough to hire legal teams and issue warrants! I just feel enough is enough and I’m sure most right minded folks think the same!