by Cllr Peter Jackson
Leader, Conservative Group,
Northumberland Conservatives
The recent Scottish referendum has brought into focus many issues which affect all of us who live in the English regions too and I feel that now is the time for us to speak up. The calls for some form of devolution of powers to the North East make a great deal of common sense. I do believe that it is the case that decisions are generally better made as close as possible to the people who are to be affected. The Government has started to move down this line with the City Deals but we also need a Rural Deal for our county.
Unfortunately in Northumberland we have been forced down the route of greater centralisation with the increasingly strident and pointedly anti-rural actions of the Labour-run unitary County Council. They have presided over a split county in which services to the more rural areas are definitely worse than those in their heartlands of the Blyth and Ashington; take the state of the roads as one example, or the lack of understanding of the effects of the £600 teenage transport tax on young people and families.
Worse than that the Labour-run County Council has now set upon a path of rebuilding Ashington town centre at a huge long-term cost to Council Taxpayers across the whole county at a time when funding is extremely tight. First, there is the bill for the new £20 million leisure centre in Ashington and now Labour are intent to waste £40 million on a new and unnecessary white elephant Council headquarters, also in Ashington. People are calling this the "Ashington Kremlin" but I am not sure whether it really will have gold topped spires to adorn the roof!
Both common sense and fairness seem to have been left behind in Northumberland. So not only will I continue to argue for more devolution on a national scale but I will carry on calling for a greater fairness in distribution within our county starting with a move to localised budgets being decided locally. The trend in our county is for increasing central control of all of our valued services such our leisure centres and housing services. These changes are politically driven and the costs to us all are all too apparent. Surely the clamour must now grow for a rebalancing in our county in favour of local communities.
