Mal

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!

While we are at this sort of point worth mentioning what Bedlington Forum used to get up to. This was an open Forum so people in Bedlington could come along and have their say on things that concerned them. The Forum came out of a meeting Wansbeck District Council set up, (supposedly to further the interest of Bedlington) well one of their officers really, who got admonished I believe for actually doing it! At the very first meeting around 200 people turned up at the Community Centre to be told we would see great things soon. First job elect a chair so they could oversee what was going on. A local councillor, who was famed for his penchant for white suits, jumped up and proposed another local councillor to chair the thing. I remember speaking at the time saying we seem to be handing out the medals before we run the race because nobody knew what this was all about so explain what this is all about and we can then elect a chair who we feel best fits the role. At the very next meeting a chair was imposed who was actually a councillor from Newbiggin! It took about a year to get rid of him! 4 sub-groups were set up, transport/roads, Conservation area, events and publicity/promotion. I was in two of those the Conservation one, because we had several shops being prosecuted for fitting shutters and the transport one because that was kinda my business at the time. We managed to hold off the shutter problems, and actually commissioned a ‘shop front design guide’ for Bedlington. On the transport side I well remember a questionnaire which the council wanted people to fill in with their requests for Bedlington. I asked everyone I came into contact with to fill one in and I knew the vast majority had mentioned the need for more parking on the Front Street. I handed in 80 responses off everyone who I had asked to fill one in and when the officer reported back he said there had been just over 100 returned and the main topic had been to pedestrianise the Front Street? I questioned that saying I had a pretty good idea what most people had wanted given the amount I had returned and was told I must have writer’s cramp filling in all those replies. Expletives! I think that was my first experience of the powers that be asking a question and not liking the answers so they just disregard them and do what they wanted to do in the first place! The main meetings started going the same way and eventually the council pulled the plug saying they were getting beat up at every meeting! Strange that for Bedlington…….not! The Chamber of Trade stepped up and paid to keep these public meetings going and that’s how Bedlington Forum was born. The chair, deputy chair and secretary of the Bedlington Forum attended every Area Meeting always lobbying for the things members of the public had brought up at their meetings. This brought recognition off NCC officers and downright distrust off the elected members of NCC! I remember going to one Area meeting where there was a presentation of the Local Plan, called the LDF at that time. I had read through all the 1780 pages and had reams of question about it. When I started asking questions about stuff that was included in the document I just couldn’t get an answer because all the councillors just looked blank? I had to ask if they had actually read the document through and was astounded when they said no we just read the chapter titles? So these people were getting paid to make decisions on stuff they hadn’t even a cursory knowledge about. On top of that at some of these meetings certain councillors nodded off in full view of the members of the public who had bothered to turn up. Some of the stuff and the way members of the public were treated sometimes was quite simply, shocking! Getting back to the Forum, (which was usually quite lively!) one item came up about the possibility of fitting defibrillators in the Town. We had a presentation off a Nurse working in the NHS and following that support off the likes of our local nurses working in our local health centres. Looked a no brainier to me so we just needed the funding. We asked the NCC councillors to back the idea with some funding and the answer was no. In fact one said absolutely no way! I never forget that and as soon as I became Chair of the Town Council we fitted 3 in the Town!

While we are on about the Lib Dems and their 4 years of tenure we have to look at something which happened in Bedlington, the disappearing Golf Club money! The sale of the remaining half of the Bedlingtonshire Golf Club started under the Labour controlled NCC but as mentioned they lost out at the very next election to the Lib Dems. Well actually it was a minority administration because they needed the Conservatives backing to actually take charge. So the sale actually went through under the Lib Dem time of control. From what I saw as a final act of contrition in the final days of Wansbeck District Council they called for any money raised by selling off the final bit of the Golf Club to be retained and spent in Bedlington. That might have been a touch of schadenfreude and scorched earth policy but at least they looked as if they finally made the effort in this case! What happened was that the money seemed to disappear? Shades of Tesco here! In those days we had Area Meetings where the administration and all the local councillors would attend and we, insignificant members of the public, could go along and ask a few questions. I kept asking the same question, month after month, where had the Golf Club money gone? I finally worked out the answer myself after receiving so many vague answers, so my next question was…….”Is it true that………?” It was finally admitted that the money from the sale of the Golf Club had been put into the General Reserves pot at NCC. This meant it would be spent in towns other than Bedlington. The political landscape and scenery might have changed but it was still the same road we were on, it’s called asset stripping as far as I was concerned! Not only that we saw services normally delivered by the District Councils and then latterly by NCC being transferred to the parish councils who charged residents extra to pay for them. Or as it was explained to me NCC simply cut the service deliveries but would transfer them to the parish councils if they were asked. I accused them of double taxation because there was no corresponding decrease in the NCC council tax so effectively we were being charged twice for the same service. Not so, I was told but I remember having a go about this for a couple of years at every Area Budget meeting. At the next election the Lib Dems were voted out and Labour retook control of NCC.

Back in 2009 we started on a round of local government reorganisation as designated by central government. There were basically two options put forward and for everyone to have their say a referendum took place. The choice was between a single Unitary Authority encompassing all of Northumberland or two, one for the rural North and West and one for the urbanised South East. The ruling Labour group wanted a single unitary, and not even considering the narcissistic power at play, there should be a huge financial benefit given the 6 District Councils were being abolished and everything they delivered would be delivered by a single Unitary Authority the cost savings should have been immense? One Chief Executive instead of 6, one head of planning and planning department instead of 6 etc etc. Of course the other side of that were the needs in the urbanised South East, where half the population lives, were different to the needs in the Rural North and West. So a referendum took place to essentially answer that question. If memory serves me correctly something like almost 52% of people who took part voted for two Authorities. The ruling Labour group must have thought that was the wrong answer so we saw the single behemoth that is NCC today, created. (Funnily enough a few years later when people were asked if they wanted a North East Assembly almost 78% responded with a no. A North East Assembly was still created and is still there, albeit very much in the background, SHHH! What is it with these people?) NCC was seen as ‘remote’ as far as a lot of residents were concerned so the Gov came up with the idea of Parish Councils to fill what was called a ‘Democratic Deficit’. Parish Councils had to be petitioned for if an area didn’t have one and as North Tyneside and Wansbeck were the only Districts to effectively ban Parish Councils we didn’t have any here. The Lib Dems who by now had taken over the reins at NCC and were the Administration, following the then recent election, petitioned for a parish for West Bedlington. This was quickly followed by the labour group petitioning for parishes at East Bedlington and one for North Bedlington, which is now called Choppington Parish Council. I remember arguing for my preferred choice at the time; bring back Bedlingtonshire Urban District Council, in one form or another because that might give us some say in meaty things like economic regeneration etc. It would certainly give us a half decent budget for some proper projects. It would also mean one clerk etc not 3! The Lib Dems also quickly changed the name of the West Bedlington Parish Council to West Bedlington Town Council. The only difference being that the chair of the Council on a Town Council is called a Mayor, for Parish Councils it’s just plain old Chair. Maybe more than a touch of egotism there because the same Lib Dems ran this council for the first 4 years! That’s why we have 3 Parish Councils in Bedlingtonshire.

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!

We are all very well aware Tesco’s pulled the plug on their Bedlington branch renovation some years ago which resulted in a very down at heel looking marketplace for so long. That aside, for the moment, I tried for years to look into the deal that was done seeing as it was reported Tesco paid £1M for the site. (There was a covenant on the car park area which stated that it had to be used by and for the residents of the Town and the site of a weekly market if so desired. That was cancelled out, how I’m not sure but it had to be for the Tesco deal to work!) I looked and asked questions everywhere to try and find where this money had gone. Not only that the then NCC councillor tried too and she got nowhere. There doesn’t seem to be any paper trail for this supposed money never mind where it ended up! When Tesco finally pulled out they were paid just over £2M I believe for the site back. Not a bad return for 3 or 4 years of being in the Town! What I did find out was that Wansbeck Life had negotiated a deal where they would take over the shops and offices which were proposed at the side of the new Tesco building because they would be included in the built at the same time. Now it doesn’t take a brain surgeon to work out that a long lease on 6 shops and offices above might come out at say £1M for the sake of argument, and the fact that Wansbeck Life was the development arm of none other than Wansbeck District Council who were the planning authority at that time. Just in my opinion, but the more I looked into it the more convinced I became; I think we couldn’t find any receipt of that £1M because it was used in the deal by Wansbeck Life to take over and be the landlord for those properties. If that was the case then we lost out big time because those shops and offices were never built and we had to pay £2M to get the site back. Even better pay day for our largest supermarket chain! Almost zero cost, 3 or 4 years of trading and then a nice wedge to walk away with. I must be wrong surly……….. If anyone reading this hasn’t read the previous posting then do so and look out for mention of Wansbeck Life! Because of the ‘bad press’ (to say the least) Wansbeck Life eventually became Arch, now that’s a name to conjure with! You couldn’t make this stuff up really it’s like being trapped in a recurring nightmare!

Starting when Adam was a lad and Wansbeck District Council held sway, I’m thinking about 1996, Bedlington was awarded Worst Christmas Lighting Display in the North East by Metro Radio. If I remember rightly there were 4 second-hand displays up on lighting posts outside the old Council Offices and one of them was faulty! Determined to put this right a Bedlington Christmas Lighting Group was formed from lady members of the then Bedlington Chamber of Trade. WDC at the time set aside £10K for lighting displays within its boundary with £5K going to Ashington and 2½ K each to Bedlington and Newbiggin. I couldn’t see two pound fifty never mind two and a half thousand in what we had that year! Anyway the group started fundraising, holding events and generally doing anything they could to get sponsorship for new lighting displays. Every member of the Chamber of Trade pulled their weight and did whatever they could. I was part of a team who asked WDC to give Bedlington the £5K seeing as we were the only town actively trying to help out with funding for new displays. A deal was struck whereby the Town that raised the most money would get the lion’s share (£5K) of the WDC pot. Sounds OK! By the autumn, when lighting displays had to be ordered and delivered, the totals came in from the towns. Ashington had raised, pretty sure it was £300, Newbiggin ignored it and instead went their own way and Bedlington had raised……..£13,000! WDC reneged on the deal and said the £5K would still be going to Ashington? That Christmas we hit most of the lamps posts in Front street with new displays, a Christmas tree with new lights and even a lighted banner across the road, 13 grands worth! BTW, we even had to pay to get them put up and taken down and new sockets on the lampposts so they could be plugged in. Funnily enough the Council paid that fitting charge and it always came out at £2½ K, irrespective of the actual number of units to be fitted! The next year and again after a hectic round of fundraising by the Christmas Light Group we had enough in the kitty to do all of Front Street, top to bottom, and started to think about going down Glebe Road and Hartford Bank. By now the fantastic success and support we had off the whole Bedlington Community was being noticed and we were told there wouldn’t be any more displays going up! Ehhh? I remember saying at a meeting we had with WDC at the time, “Instead of recognising the support the community have given and the hard work and dedication of the Lights Group you really want to kybosh the whole initiative, why not celebrate it?” We ignored them and just started another year of fund raising. We noticed lighting displays we had bought were being put up in Ashington so I questioned that without ever getting an answer, but I saw them for myself! WDC then sent the Lights Group a bill for several thousand pounds for…….electricity, saying they had so many days to pay or they would be taken to court! That obviously frightened the lasses and they asked me to go with them to see the Chief Executive of WDC who had ordered them to attend a meeting. We even took a local Minister along for a witness! They guy was playing hardball and wouldn’t listen to any pleas or suggestions from the Lights Group and finally said he would be taking them to court for an unpaid bill. I told him great because I will be included because all the Lights Group were Chamber of Trade members and I was the chair and I will be countersuing you bonny lad for defrauding the people of Bedlington, because every penny we raised was for Bedlington Christmas lights and you have appropriated them and used them elsewhere. Not only that I will be suing for compensation for distress about the electrical bill you have sent. I knew there was no meterage on lighting columns the council agreed likely usage every year and agreed a financial amount with the power company, there was no way they could justify the money they demanded! If I remember rightly the Minister pulled us apart! Shortly after that the Lighting Group were asked how much money they had in their account and after saying how much there was received a bill for exactly that amount. They paid and said the whole debacle had left a bad taste in their mouths so they would fold the Group. The press got hold of the story and ran it with the banner, something like.………… Local Council plays Scrooge with the Fairy Godmothers of Bedlington.

With the furore generated about this new hotel idea and it seems I’m somehow involved and not paying heed to democracy, let’s lay out what really happened over the years. When Labour was originally in charge their idea was to build 60 odd houses in what was Tesco’s car park. Around 700 of us turned up at the library and told them in no uncertain terms that we wanted to see commercial development in the town centre not housing! That plan was hastily redrawn! We then had a consultation on the proposed town centre design and were given 4 options for the layout as well as the styles of buildings. Most of us picked the ‘wrong’ design and the scheme went forward with the designs that the great and good thought were best for us! We saw the Make a Noise demo which was supposed to give a kick up the backside and demonstrate local feelings yet still nothing happened. The Tories then came into power at NCC claiming Bedlington was very important to ‘us’. To be fair we did see £12-14M in one year’s budget for our Town Centre redevelopment but as they are annual budgets and no substantial scheme came forward that money never materialised! We finally saw a scheme come forward which had around 45,000sq ft of retail development, of which Aldi was just under 20,000sq ft and the linchpin for the whole development. Covid came along and all the potential retailers went underground with a cull on all their new developments. Aldi were persuaded to carry on with theirs. The Gov then announced funding to get schemes like the one for Bedlington back on track and we managed to secure that funding by matching it. This is what is being used to do the 4 shops and 6 apartments at the Market Place. We then saw potential funding in the Borderlands project albeit on a much reduced level (£3M) but still that could be seed funding to get the main development back on track. (Several community consultations later and we still see a leisure offer as being consistently the number one response. ) Another community consultation on what people wanted to see developed has resulted in over 35 potential projects which are to be wrapped up in a Bedlington Place Plan. We then see a hotel project being put forward not by NCC but by local councillors, of which I’m certainly not one of them. This scheme at Bedlington Station could wipe out all the Borderlands funding for the whole of Bedlington! That wasn’t why I fought to get Bedlington into the Borderlands funding and kept pushing it along! https://www.youtube.com/live/Q4zZGP1LXjI... With that out of the way I do believe we need to see Bedlington as a destination town and for that we need a USP. We do need the normal range of what anyone would expect in a Town the size of Bedlington but we also need a draw so we get footfall from other places too. That’s the opportunity I see in getting the marketplace development right. PS. Back in the annuls of time in the late 60’s just before Wansbeck District Council came into being, Bedlington Urban District Council had plans for a hotel and leisure centre in Bedlington Town Centre. Pity they didn’t see them through!

I'm going to put up my 'Historical Factoids' which have been published on my Page on another site. I did them because I was tired of the distortion that was being reported that surrounded these events so that needed to be corrected. I checked each one with the other people who were involved at the time to make sure I wasn't flavouring things and what I wrote down was as accurate as possible! First I'm going to start with something I wrote in 2013 and even now, more than ten years later, seems to be as apt as ever, certainly the last bit! I will put them up in the sequence I wrote them............. The Spirit of Bedlington: Bedlington’s just about a dog, it’s often been said, If that’s what you believe, Ge yasel a smack on the heed! Steeped in history and culture and grime and true grit, The Bedlington folk would call you a great twit! Back in the annuls of time, Forged out of great sweat, The Town now standing owes No one a debt. Back where it began No one is quite sure, But it must have been olden And really secure. The Town first written about, Thanks to St Cuthbert the monk, His laying at rest The Danes and Normans to debunk. For long times later, under Durham was placed, So the Town was not Northumberland based. A great Hall for the Bishop and privileged to use, A court building too for assizes to muse. King John himself liked to stay in the Town, Not sure he was welcomed without-so-much as a frown. This must have meant the Town was of import, You were lucky to live here not a place of last resort. The people around for their daily bread did need The Bishops mill on the river to grind out their feed. When this mill went idle another came through To power the Iron Works and give work to the crew. At first the jobs were all for some nailers But soon they became world famous railroad railers. Built on coal and iron in times more recent, The folks hereabouts living lives really decent. Birkenshaw, Longridge and Gooch To name but few all men of good grace Bound up with Bedlington hereto. The sign above the Iron works For the Bedlington Nailer, ‘We live by fire, water, iron and God’s favour. Soon changed to make the iron horses so new Running on the rails which were Birkenshaw’s breakthrough. Soon coal was the king and many a pit, Sunk into the earth thought never to quit. The town now had jobs but never was clean, Its bikini line never to be seen. The Auld Pit came first Then came the Winnin, Next off the blocks came Cambois, But that was for swimming. Thousands of miners, Digging out the black gold, The pennies they earned to keep their households. Our dogs now must make their timely debut, No yapping or casting, And certainly not blue. Bred from Old Flint, Down country they came, But it’s Bedlington where they found their great fame. The Town and its history so long into the past, Its role in the county so obviously miscast. More history than others, Of similar scope, A resurgence of pride We all do but hope. The people who lived here for such a long time, Now mingle with others who are just in their prime. New houses and buildings bring people by the flock The problem is now development gridlock. No thought has been put into what folks might like to do, So the money they could spend locally now just says adieu. To the shiny cathedrals of metal and glass Leaving our local traders to feel second class. It’s the pressures of life this modern we are told, But it’s our local shops we see having to fold. Change will come when its least expected, All standing together no interest more vested. A proud people and town of once in the past, No longer just subject to verbal bombast. Malcolm Robinson 2013.

Wow!

I need to pinch that cartoon GGG😄

Vic..........planning early next year......... https://www.northumberlandgazette.co.uk/news/politics/council/major-milestone-reached-in-ps10billion-ai-data-centre-scheme-in-northumberland-4896802?utm_medium=Social&utm_source=Facebook&fbclid=IwY2xjawG_mhNleHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHdplEg6hAbl-_bv1qHZ4PcDoEHZFIiV6CTyhecapyYwOSuNIAlQd9Om9CQ_aem_23lTItGp2UR8r9o_tQvCkg#Echobox=1733438593

I read a newspaper report this morning saying '100's turned out in Morpeth and Alnwick for Remembrance Sunday.' If I wrote the copy............ ...meanwhile 1000's turn out in Bedlington as ususal !!!!!!!!

Some of the crowd pics yesterday............Thanks Simon Williams.

Do you mind if I copy this and put in on one of the Bedlington social media pages?

An honour and a great privilege to lay a wreath today at the Bedlington Cenotaph on this, Remembrance Sunday, on behalf of all residents in my Bedlington West Ward.

If anyone wants to know whats going in now..............

For anyone interested in the development in Cambois.................... Here is the scrutiny meeting: