The week ending......9 June 2013

What a week. Normally I do the week ending post on a Sunday but here I am on a Saturday night winding down from the week and decided I am going to try and have a day off tomorrow, note the word try..lol.

Anyway back to the week. Monday night saw me at the new health and social care scrutiny committee. I wrote a post about that and you can see that here. That is a committee that I am looking forward to sitting on over the year and seeing how it develops. I like the mix of Councillors on there too from all parties and I think that we can have some really good debates and get to understand this issue.

Tuesday night I attended the opposition Councillors meeting. This meeting is where opposition Cllrs meet the Chief Executive and directors of department meet us and they share what things are coming off in the future. I will give you a bit of history on this meetings. In the past another opposition Cllr and myself heard that Labour had secret meetings in Haigh Hall. They were doing this so opposition Cllrs didn't learn what was happening. After me and the other Cllr gate crashed the meeting the then Chief Executive agreed that there would be no more secret meetings and we would have opposition cllrs meetings. Now this weeks meeting just turned out to be just a load of waffle and I have said if they are not informative then I will not be attending and the Deputy Chief Executive has agreed that the remit of the meetings might need changing. I hope that we can get this meeting back on track.

Wednesday night saw me attend another scrutiny Council meeting, Confident Places. Here we discussed the core strategy that the Council is undertaking at the moment. This item lasted an hour and worrying Labour voted to allow 1000 houses to be built in Standish. What is even more disturbing is the Tory Cllr on Wigan Council voted with Labour to allow these houses too. What a disgrace! I am sure that this topic will be my main focus next week.

Friday saw me presenting 10 Downing Street with a letter of objection and part of the petition that we have going at the minute. Here is a post that I have posted on the topic here.

 



Years ago I was part of the Save Mere Oaks campaign and one of the pupil's uncle took lots of pictures on lots of different occasions and this week he kindly sent me a CD with hundreds of pictures of the campaign on it, including the march and the trip to London. A big thank you for that.

One complaint I have had was the state of Gidlow Cemetery. I took a visit and agree that this needs addressing with the grass not being cut, the road with pot holes in and the bins overflowing. This place should be looked after a lot better of this and I have written to the Chief Executive with my disgust.

This morning I held my surgery at the Library and had a couple of resident that called in to find out about the campaign to stop the houses and on that matter we now have had the draft response back in from the legal team. I will be reviewing that on Monday but there are a couple of interesting points being raised with that. Once we have the final response I will post it on here but a big thanks for all the people that have donated and helped with the campaign. Soon we will know if we have to take it to the next level or if we can persuade that Council and the Government planning inspector that Standish cannot cope with these houses.

Finally, I have had a update on the Domino shop and barriers of some kind will be going in. The Council are going to look at getting the shop to put the old ones back in as they where there on their planning application so they should stay. If they don't the Council will look to address it. Also there will tickets issued for people that block the pavement as we saw in the pictures on my original post here.