The Voice of Standish is the Residents.

There has been much talk about Standish Voice's plans to turn the Rec on Southlands Ave into a Car Park. Local residents on that estate and others in Standish are concerned and oppose these plans strongly.

Last Tuesday Standish Voice had their meeting and lots of residents from Standish attended to oppose their proposal of turning the Rec into a Car Park. What also happened was we learnt a lot more.

The meeting was chaired by Gill Foster, who did a decent job of chairing the meeting.

As well as opposing their proposal, residents asked a number of questions. The first one that caught our attention was the fact that residents said that the Drawing was wrong and the Car Park was too small for what was being proposed. Standish Voice revealed that it was actually Wigan Council's drawings and it was ONLY indicative. Interesting!

Then it came clear that Standish Voice had been having secret meetings with Wigan Council on this matter. What we must remember was last June (2016) it was the Standish Independents that exposed this and said that someone had been knocking on a few doors asking residents about their thoughts. After speaking with a few their did not ask any more - as the reaction was clear. Here is that story from June 2016.

Residents asked about the number of people that had asked for this and SV (Standish Voice) said that just over 500 people had said in their survey that Car Parking was an issue. Now SV neighbour area that they chose has over 15,000 people.That's just over 3% of people thought parking was an issue but many did not ask for the Rec to be a Car Park but it has become clear that SV are manipulating that data for their own end.

To be fair I think most people would agree, if they were asked, that car parking is an issue but not their top issue. In that I think we can all agree housing is. But the second issue is traffic and like residents said, if there was a car park then that brings more traffic and unless the Council comes forward with a plan on that matter then a car park will just make things worse.

Also I raised the issue that the consultation online was flawed and that it could be manipulated and people cheat. Paul Ogden, the founder, of Standish Voice said this was the case and they knew about that. If that is true why run a consultation that they knew had flaws? Unless they knew and wanted to use this to make sure that they could do it so the responses reflected what they wanted? The flaws that I am discussing is that people from around the world can vote, in fact some one in South Africa has voted they have said. Another flaw is that you can vote a number of times. Paul Ogden of SV said this was not the case as the IP address would be flagged. An IP address is a unique internet number from your internet connection. A resident rightly said that if this was the case then all those that may go to the Library would not count as 30 people could use that PC and it would only show 1 IP address. As you can see this process was either not well thought out or was well thought out and there to be manipulated for their own ends.

SV could not agree if there is or isn't a covenant on the land and I can tell you that there is. I will scan this in over the next few days. As you can see the residents are not taking this and are determined to fight this and fight they will!

Come back and see more as this fight goes on. I believe that both Wigan Council and Standish Voice should stop this idea and pull this now. The question is will they?