Reporting Back: Arena Bombing and the Fire Service

Last week was the regular monthly meeting of the Greater Manchester Corporate Issues and Reform Scrutiny Committee. This report is from the Liberal Democrat representative on the Committee,  Prestwich councillor Tim Pickstone.

Last week’s meeting mainly focussed on the very significant issues raised in the Kerslake Report into the 2017 Arena bombing terrorist incident and the response of the Fire Service. Amongst other things this Scrutiny Committee is responsible looking into the work of our local fire service.

A non- statutory independent review of the events and aftermath of the Manchester Arena Terrorist Attack were commissioned, chaired by cross-bench Peer Lord Kerslake. This Review has focused on Greater Manchesters’ preparedness for and response to the attack and the nine days that followed it.

The review has identified what a range of responding agencies did well on the night and during the following week that helped people as well as what could have been done better.

The Scrutiny Committee specifically focussed on the work of the fire service, with both the Elected Mayor (who is responsible for fire services) and the Acting Fire Commander there to answer questions from councillors.

As people will have read in the media, the significant issue was the time between Greater Manchester Fire being alerted of an incident, and attending the scene at Manchester Victoria, which was almost two hours.

A full report and timeline is here.

Some of the issues raised by councillors included:

  • Issues of seemingly poor communications between the Fire Service and other emergency services, and more can be done to ensure that this works better in the future.
  • Issues around morale in the fire service, and whether working practices can be updated.
  • Lessons learnt from the fire service in updating its own procedures in dealing with bombs.
  • How the lessons learnt in Greater Manchester were already being taken to make change in procedures nationally.

I asked specifically about the issue of the procedure of the Fire Service (and this is Government guidance not a Greater Manchester procedure) that in the event of a shooting terrorist attack to withdraw to a ‘safe distance’ of 0.5km. I asked how Fire Service was developing its thinking on the balance between the need to protect fire fighters, with the need to protect the public. This is not a simple issue but I feel that we need to think about how the public would be protected in a major incident in the future, where 0.5km would cover a large part of our city centre.

 

Vote for someone who’ll get things done for your community on 3rd May

Liberal Democrat councillors listen, work hard and get things done for their communities. It’s why right across the country, people have been electing more of them, week in, week out.

There is a secret phenomenon in British politics.

It is occurring in by-elections all over the country, week in, week out, to local authorities from Sunderland to Somerset. Against the Tories. Against Labour. In Leave areas. In Remain areas.

Since the general election in 2017, the Liberal Democrats are up 15 seats, double Labour’s increase of 7, while the Conservatives are tanking – they have lost 18 seats.

These real votes in real ballot boxes show Liberal Democrat support at double our national opinion poll rating. What we’re showing is that where Liberal Democrats come out fighting, Liberal Democrats can win.

Because local residents trust Liberal Democrats to listen, work hard and get things done on their behalf.

And in our areas of particular strength, where we control Councils and win mayoralties, we run reliable, responsive local services and deliver value for people’s Council Tax.

On Thursday 3rd May, vote for someone who will get things done for your community. Vote Liberal Democrat.

Taking Action on Tax Avoidance

Liberal Democrat councillors on Bury Council have been successful in a a move to get Bury Council to play its part in tackling corporate tax avoidance.

Lib Dem Councillors brought a motion on tax avoidance to the last full meeting of Bury Council. The motion was supported by other parties and is now the official policy of Bury Council.

The proposal was part of an initiative by the International Aid charity Cristian Aid and their  tax justice campaign, which aims to put pressure on companies who don’t pay tax. Christian Aid’s rationale is the sheer scale of the money lost to the developing world each year through corporate tax avoidance – estimated to be anything between  $100-$300 billion worldwide each year.

Councillor Tim Pickstone said in proposing the motion: “We agree wholeheartedly with Christian Aid, but for us tax avoidance in this country is also vitally important. Anything up to £30 billion a year is lost to public funds in Britain each year. £7 billion is lost each year just by the tax just by companies operating in Britain who declare profits made in Britain in other countries. This has to stop.”

“Government must take a lead on tax avoidance and as individual consumers we can all play our part. But local councils can and should play a role. As Councils we procure a large number of goods and services, and we can and should use that ‘purchasing muscle’ to put pressure on companies who do not pay their fair share of tax”.

Under the proposals that were agreed by the Council meeting, Bury Council will review its procurement policies to ensure that it fully considers the tax paying record of companies when making purchasing decisions. A report will be brought to the Cabinet in the next twelve months to finalise the details.

 

 

NHS Bury announce cuts of £5.2 million

Bury’s NHS Clinical Commissioning Group (CCG) has announced cuts of £5.2 million for the financial year just started, towards meeting an expected £7.3 million deficit for the year.

The cuts agreed are:
Primary Care (GPs etc) £1.1 million – the largest items being:
– Terminating the Vulnerable Patient Scheme, saving c£0.1m.
– Terminating the Clinical Pharmacist scheme, saving c £0.3m-£0.6m.
– Reducing the prescribing target by £0.5 million – though a decision about whether this will include stopping prescribing nicotine replacement options has been postponed.

Secondary Care (Hospitals) £1.8 million – the largest items being:
– Reducing the amount of treatments that are deemed no proven clinical benefit; or of potential clinical value but only in a clearly defined set of clinical presentations/criteria by £1 million a year.
– Reducing diagnostic tests by £0.8 million in a full year (out of £7 million a year so more than 10% reduction).

Community Services £0.5 million:
– Do not renew the Minor Eye Conditions Service, saving c£0.2m in year.
– Other service reviews, including some IVF, targeting saving c£0.3m in year. (Though the decision on IVF has been postponed).

Other: £1.8 million
Savings made centrally, including relocation the HQ building from Silver Street.

Liberal Democrats nationally have called for an extra £6 billion for the NHS, to be paid for by an extra 1p on Income Tax, because the NHS is having to make cuts like these in Bury.

Don’t Persecute Honest Passengers!

Don’t persecute honest passengers, prosecute fare-dodgers is the message from the Opposition Spokesperson on Transport for Greater Manchester Committee.

Investigations from the Lib Dem team of councillors here in Bury revealed that an estimated one in eight Metrolink passengers are fare-dodgers with T4GM confirming that they estimate that 12% of journeys are not paid for.

Last year the nine Labour and one Conservative council Leaders who make up the Greater Manchester Comined Authority voted to to put up fares for honest Metrolink passengers by an inflation-busting 19% by 2020 when one in eight passengers travel free.

 

Liberal Democrat Spokesperson on Transport for Greater Manchester Councillor Howard Sykes said: “There are 40 million tram journeys a year so fare-dodging is estimated to cost Metrolink about £9 million in lost revenue a year. Rather than hammering the honest passenger, transport bosses need to focus on tackling fare evasion. 12% non-payment is a disgrace. Everyone should pay their ‘fare share’, so we say tackle the fare-dodgers. We need more enforcement officers on the line at more times and we need to ruthlessly prosecute non-payers.”

Liberal Democrats in Bury have previously called for an automatic ticket “barrier” system, perhaps at all but the city centre stops, which is used on most urban public transport systems to reduce fare evasion.

 

Couples in Northern Ireland deserve equality – and our support

Layla Moran is co-sponsoring a bill to finally bring marriage equality to Northern Ireland – find out why

I couldn’t have been prouder of Lynne Featherstone and the Liberal Democrats in government when we changed the law in England, bringing in equal marriage.

It is, without doubt, one of the best things our party did in government.

And whilst all couples in England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland all now enjoy the right to marry the person they love, sadly the same isn’t true in Northern Ireland.

That’s why I am part of a cross-party group of MPs proposing the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) (Northern Ireland) Bill in the House of Commons today.

I know that in sponsoring this legislation I have the backing of Liberal Democrat members across the length and breadth of the United Kingdom.

It was a real pleasure to meet with campaigners from Northern Ireland’s Love Equality coalition in Parliament yesterday.

They’ve done amazing work with the public, community organisations and campaign groups to build support for this much-needed change in the law. Equal marriage now has the support of most parties in Northern Ireland, including enthusiast support from our colleagues in the Alliance Party who have long campaigned for marriage equality.

Indeed, before its collapse, a majority of Assembly Members had voted to support equal marriage.

Now I’d much rather that this decision was being made by local politicians in Belfast – but given that there is no immediate prospect of getting the Northern Ireland Assembly up and running I believe it is the right thing to do for MPs to be changing the law in Westminster.

Same-sex couples there have waited too long already for equality.

Given the circumstances, we owe it to the people of Northern Ireland to do the right thing and to allow all couples in the province the right to marry the person they love.

After all, love is love – no matter where you live.

Warning that Hospital admissions due to falls by older people set to reach nearly 1,000 a day.

Local Liberal Democrats have warned that the number of hospital admissions due to an older person falling, is set to rise to nearly 1,000 a day across England by the end of the decade.

The worrying forecast, according to data released by the Local Government Association, has prompted renewed calls for more funding for adult social care to invest in cost-effective prevention work to reduce falls, which can have devastating and life-threatening consequences on a person’s health and wellbeing.

New research shows that falls prevention programmes run by councils reduce the number of falls requiring hospital admission by nearly a third (29 per cent). For every £1 spent on preventing falls in the home, £3 is saved in hospital care. Extra government funding for councils to scale up this prevention work to address a rising older population would help the NHS by reducing the need for people to be admitted to hospital after a fall and cut costs to the public purse.

Falls are said to cost the NHS more than £2 billion a year – the amount needed to plug the annual funding gap that councils face in adult social care by 2020. But Government funding restrictions are limiting the work that local councils can do.

Local Liberal Democrats believe many falls can be avoided and are calling for:
– Greater awareness raising among the public around fall prevention
– The Government to fully address the adult social care funding gap, which will reach more than £2 billion by 2020
– Adult social care to be put on an equal footing to the NHS

Latest figures from England in 2016/17, show there were 316,669 hospital admissions of people aged 65 and over due to falling, amounting to two thirds of all fall-related admissions. Around a fifth of these were as a result of slipping, tripping or stumbling.

Data sourced from a Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents’ analysis of Hospital Episode Statistics for England, published by NHS Digital. The figures relate to episodes of admitted patient care under a hospital consultant. More information: Get up and go guide to staying steady

PM must back Lib Dem NHS funding scheme

Theresa May has been making positive noises about funding the NHS properly recently – and if she wants to do that, then the Lib Dem plan is the best one out there.

Although it is a step in the right direction for Theresa May to take a long-term approach to funding the NHS, it is not clear whether the government will commit to new revenue streams to fund the health service.

This is despite the fact that over 100 MPs have taken the same view as the Liberal Democrats in backing an examination of a hypothecated tax, to protect the future of the NHS and social care.

We hope that the Prime Minister will take the first vital step by supporting the Liberal Democrat plan to raise essential extra revenue for the NHS and social care by putting up income tax by a penny in the pound.

Meanwhile, plans must be put in place to implement a hypothecated tax to secure long-term sustainable funding.

Greater Manchester Housing Update

Two important announcements in the last month about future housing construction in Greater Manchester.

The first is the publication, by the 10 Greater Manchester Councils (the Greater Manchester Strategic Authority, GMSA) of a detailed map of land identified for future housing and employment developments. The Councils estimate that this is potentially enough land for an extra 175,000 homes across greater Manchester over the next 20 years.

The Mayor said: “We’ve published this data so everyone can see the land we’ve identified for potential development. We’re now asking local people, community groups and others to take a look at these sites and let us know if there are any we have missed, or if there are other sites they think we should consider”.

The full map is available here. Most of these sites are what you might call ‘brownfield’ sites. For Bury, the heaviest concentration of them is in Radcliffe. Some of the sites (the East Lancashire Paper Mill site in Radcliffe, or the Cussons site in Rainsough) already have plans for housing. Some (land behind Tesco in Prestwich) are/have already being built on.

The second announcement is a deal that is being discussed  between the Government and Greater Manchester. Under the terms of the deal

  • Greater Manchester has to deliver on a Strategic Plan to provide land for 227,200 new homes over the next 19 years (to 2035). (To put that into context Bolton, Bury and Salford added together currently contain 283,000 homes.)
  • Greater Manchester would have ‘accelerated delivery’ getting up to 12,375 new houses a year (to put that into context that is a new Whitefield every year).

In return the Government will look at
Taking four Housing Infrastructure Fund Forward Funding bids through to co-development:
– Manchester’s Northern and Eastern Gateways;
– City Centre Salford Housing Growth Programme;
– Bolton and Wigan Key Route Network;
– South East Manchester Bus Rapid Transit Scheme.

–  Provide a Land Fund of up to £50m to provide support for the remediation of brownfield land for housing. The land fund should deliver at least 4200 homes and will be subject to value for money assurance.
– Provide up to £8m capacity funding to build the Greater Manchester Place Team to support the ambitious increase in housing delivery, building on the Manchester City Place team.
– Provide £10.25m to help regenerate the Collyhurst estate to deliver more affordable homes.

It is really important to notice that the current land identified has potential for 175,000 new homes, but the Council are committing to plan for 227,200 new homes. For us this rings massive alarm bells that the next draft of the Greater Manchester Strategic Framework being published (just after the local elections) in June 2018 will again include the destruction of Green Belt land (Draft 1 included massive loss of Green Belt in Prestwich, Whitefield, Unsworth and around Elton Reservoir).

So good news that so much brownfield land has been identified. Concern that the Councils are signing up to a plan that could see the Mayor going back on his pre-election promise of no net loss of Green Belt.

 

 

Every Child Empowered – An Education Revolution

We’ve just passed new policy that gives education in England the shake-up it sorely needs.

We’ve put up with a school system that fails our children and our wider economy for far too long. Today, we’re announcing plans to abolish Ofsted and shake up the way in which school and pupil performance is judged in England.

Our current system is completely outdated. We teach our students to remember facts and figures but not how to apply and adapt them, which in an AI world is sorely needed. We focus so much on high-stakes testing that we overlook other crucial areas of a child’s development, which has led to a mental health crisis in our schools and universities. It needs to change.

The Lib Dems will replace Ofsted with a new Inspector of Schools who will report on a broad array of qualities including pupil welfare, the promotion of equality of opportunity and teacher workload, sickness and retention, as well as attainment measures.

It’s also time to scrap KS1 and KS2 SATs to reduce the incredible pressure we put on our teachers and pupils. We want a revolutionary new system that focuses on moderated teacher assessment and light-touch testing.

We’ll equip the next generation for adult life – not just the “three Rs” but creativity and the arts, SRE, financial literacy and first aid skills, and completely rework the curriculum to recognise these values, empowering each individual child to be the best that they can and want to be.