URGENT – FREE TO A GOOD HOME/ORGANISATION

Several pool tables (5) and a table tennis table.  Also, some tables, chairs and a large screen TV.

If you have already been in touch no need to do so again – you are already on the list 🙂

The list of expressions of interest will close AM Sunday 13 Sept.

If you are a local Shaw and Crompton Group; Organisation; Charity; Faith; Youth; Non for Profit or Social Enterprise or any other Group or Organisation (or Individual) who might be interested, please drop me a quick email. 

Do not post on here!

Please email me directly – email below

howard.sykes@oldham.gov.uk

Please state organisation/group.  Your role in in etc and any other useful info but please keep it brief.

Delivery can be provided so no requirement for anyone to find transport.

If no takers from Shaw and Crompton similar ‘applications’ from groups from a wider geographical area would be welcome, please do drop me a short email.  Do not post on here!

Please email me direct at:

howard.sykes@oldham.gov.uk

Please state organisation/group.  Your role in in etc and any other useful info but please keep it brief.

The above offer is from the: Very Group – following the closing of their site in Shaw and they asked for my help to ensure the above go to good use locally.

Time is short so please act now if you think you might be interested.

The list of expressions of interest will close AM Sunday 13 Sept.

My two allowed Leader’s Questions to Oldham Full Council 9 September 2020

1) Local is the New Normal

Madame Mayor, my first question concerns the future of our district centres in the post-Covid world.

This Administration has expended countless officer hours, commissioned many specialist reports, and expended many millions of pounds on its regeneration plans for Oldham town centre over the years.

Whilst some welcome progress has been made, much of the effort and expenditure has frankly come to nothing.  Now Covid-19 has slain the latest plans.

The prospects for the ‘Creating a Better Place’ master plan, first adopted by this Administration in July 2019 and involving an investment of £306 million, has just been reviewed by Cabinet and a third or £100 million axed off that budget.

Covid has massively increased our costs, decimated our revenue, and now as a Council we quite simply do not now have the cash.

The original plan envisaged a mixture of housing, retail, leisure and office developments.

We need many thousands of new homes and I would rather they be built in Oldham Town Centre and on brownfield sites than developed at the expense of our Green Belt and green spaces.

Now we will be restructuring existing retail, leisure and office spaces, rather than bringing new space into use.

If you walk through the Town Square and Spindles Shopping Centres you can see the empty spaces.  For over a decade now, footfall along Britain’s high streets has been declining.  Covid-19 has simply accelerated the trend.

Office workers are not coming back to our Town Centre, including the Council’s.  Home-working is here to stay, and for many of us it will continue to be the only way to work or the only way we can work.

For all the talk of investing in Oldham Town Centre to ‘Create a Better Place’, there has been no talk about, and no focus on, the other district centres in our Borough, except for Royton – which is still talk only!

This Administration may have adopted a new mantra ‘We are Oldham’ but Oldham is not just the Town Centre, it is a Borough of Town and District Centres, each with a proud history and its own distinctive character.

For Local is the New Normal.

The Council’s ambition of ‘Creating a Better Place’, there has been no mention of investing in these localities to make the local better. 

So, I would like to ask the Leader tonight whether he and his Cabinet colleagues will consider reallocating some of the investment intended for Oldham Town Centre to create ‘Better Places’ to live for those of us who live, shop, socialise or work in Lees, Royton, Chadderton, Failsworth, Shaw and the Saddleworth Villages?

2) Full pay for anyone forced to self-isolate

Thank you, Madame Mayor.

I agree with Greater Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham who recently called for the Government to pay anyone forced to self-isolate their full wages, where there is no employer to do so.

The current situation is a nonsense and it discourages people from participating fully and faithfully in Track and Trace and from choosing to self-isolate.

I will use two examples.

Person A:

A low-paid employee working in the ‘gig’ economy, not knowing how many hours or how many days a week or a month they will work and forced to claim Universal Credit to make ends meet and battling between pay days with financial insecurity and the complexities and frustrations of the benefits system.

Person A isn’t entitled to full pay when they do not work; their employer only offers Statutory Sick Pay.

Person B:

A self-employed tradesperson with a start-up business carrying out jobs for private customers in domestic dwellings.

Person B goes out to work, they cannot work from a makeshift office under the stairs, and, as a self-employed person, if they don’t work, they don’t earn; they have no employer-based sick pay scheme.

If our Persons A and B go for a well-earned pint in the pub at the end of the day – separately of course because under Oldham’s rules they cannot meet in the same pub as members of two separate households –  they are meant to record their personal details with the establishment in case there is a Covid infection there and they need to be traced.

But why does Person A or Person B have any incentive to diligently fill in their details when, if they were subsequently contacted and forced to self-isolate, they will lose at least 10 days and possibly two weeks work, with little or no sick pay as a result?

That is why you see Track and Trace records in pubs and elsewhere noting the presence of Batman and Bart and Lisa Simpson amongst their recent customers.

Now the Government has now grudgingly agreed to pay the recipients of Universal Credit or Work Credits a paltry sum of £13 a day for any time that they are required to self-isolate.

Oldham is one of the first pilot areas where this will apply.

Would the Leader agree that this derisory sum will in no way recompense Person A and Person B from Oldham for their loss during self-isolation?

And will he agree to join with me to lobby to introduce a meaningful compensation scheme?

Then A and B can faithfully record their Track and Track details and participate in self-isolation, and not have to disguise their movements using the names of fictitious superheroes or cartoon characters.

Then we can fight and tackle the blight Covid – 19 is causing to our Borough and the communities that live and work within it.

Councillor Howard Sykes MBE, Leader of the Opposition, Leader of the Liberal Democrat Group Oldham Council

Democracy please – Labour hypocrisy over planning issues

This Wednesday (9 Sept), Oldham Council will be debating a motion calling for planning to have ‘democratic control at its heart’ in response to a Conservative Governments proposal to abolish Planning Committees, but to Liberal Democrat Group Leader, Councillor Howard Sykes MBE, says Labour would have had more credibility over this issue if they practiced what they preached.

At the June 17 meeting of Oldham Council, despite the vocal objections of Liberal Democrat Councillors, the Labour Group abolished the entitlement of Ward Councillors to address the Planning Committee to speak about local applications on behalf of their constituents. 

Labour also agreed changes to allow planning officers to dispose of public open land more easily, and empowered officers to decide on developments of 20 homes or less without bringing them for a decision before a meeting of the Planning Committee. 

Abolishing the absolute right of Councillors to speak up for their constituents and the divestment of power from elected Planning Committees to unelected Planning officers are two proposals also contained in the Conservative Government’s new White Paper Planning for the Future, now out to public consultation.

The Liberal Democrats voted against the changes proposed by Labour; instead, in order to preserve planning democracy, they proposed three amendments to the proposals to require the Head of Planning to consult with the senior Opposition Spokesperson on Planning over appeals made by Councillors to speak before the Planning Committee and over plans to dispose of Council land and property.  They also wanted the Friends of Parks and Moors groups to be properly recognised and consulted over the land for which they act as stewards.

Labour voted against all three amendments, defeating them.

Councillor Sykes said:  “Labour cries foul when the Conservative Government threatens their vested interests and seeks to reduce their power over planning matters, but they are quite happy to ride roughshod over the democratic rights of individual members to speak for their constituents to the Planning Committee or over the rights of local people or the members of the Friends groups, who do such sterling service as the unpaid stewards of public land, to speak up over housing developments that hurt their communities.”

Councillor Sykes added: “The Conservative Group for its part did not seem to know which way was up.  Two Conservative Councillors, including its Group Leader, simply chose not to vote and only one Tory Councillor amongst the four was consistent in supporting our position.” 

“This just goes to show that only the Liberal Democrats can be trusted to stand up for democratic values in Council; clearly voting Conservative means voting for confusion and indecision.  I hope the electorate will remember that when they cast their ballots at the 2021 local elections.”


Creation of Brownfield Fund welcome, but will fail to ‘scratch the surface’

The Oldham Liberal Democrats have welcomed the creation of a so called new £400-million Brownfield Land fund, from which £81.1 million will be made available to the 10 Greater Manchester Authorities over the next five years, but say the overall investment ‘won’t scratch the surface’ when compared to the cost of remediating former industrial land in our City Region to make it fit for housing.

Alongside publishing a new White Paper ‘Planning for the Future’ last month, the Conservative Government restated its so-called commitment to building new homes on brownfield sites first; an approach the Oldham Liberal Democrats have been campaigning for years.

Councillor Howard Sykes MBE, Liberal Democrat Group Leader, explained: “According to Department of Trade figures, the UK has approximately 1,000,000 acres of contaminated land, much of it in Northern towns, like Oldham Borough.  The estimated average cost of cleaning up contaminated land is £250,000 per acre – meaning a staggering £250-billion would be required to clear them all up for development.  Seen against these figures, a £400-million National Brownfield Land fund, though welcome, looks woefully inadequate if we are serious.”

“Even if Oldham received the full £81.1 million allocated to Greater Manchester, and we will not, it won’t really scratch the surface.  In a Borough with an industrial heritage of textile manufacturing; dye and chemical works; engineering and coal mining; we have an awful lot of sites that are heavily contaminated, and these will need a lot of money to clean up to make ready for any redevelopment especially housing.  We will of course accept any money we are given, but the Liberal Democrats see this as a small step forward on a long journey to securing the serious money for remediation that we need.”

The Liberal Democrats are keen to point out that most of the money allocated to Greater Manchester is not new.

Councillor Sykes added:  “When the ten Labour Greater Manchester authorities agreed to the Government’s Greater Manchester Spatial Framework to build tens of thousands of new homes across our city region over two decades, the deal came with a sweetener – a promise of £50 million from central government for remediation.  The Conservatives then reneged on that promise, something the Oldham Liberal Democrats drew public attention to in our motion to Oldham Council on this issue in July 2019.  Now the cash is back, and we have to be mindful to continue to fight to hold onto it this second time.”

The motion to the full meeting of Oldham Council on 10 July 2019 read:

Restoring Government Funding for Brownfield Housing Development

Council notes that:

  • The Conservative Government in its white paper ‘Fixing our Broken Housing Market’ stated that more homes should be built ‘by maximising the contribution from brownfield sites’.
  • Brownfield sites suffer from significant contamination, whether below-ground or in a building’s construction, which is the result of previous industrial use as cotton mills; chemical and coal gas plants; coal mines; and dye works.
  • Decontaminating such sites is very expensive at an average cost of £250,000 per acre and this cost often renders housing developments unaffordable.
  • According to Department of Trade figures, approximately 1 million acres of brownfield sites are contaminated.
  • Much of this land is in Northern towns, like Oldham, a legacy of their industrial past.
  • In the Outline Housing Package agreed between the ten Greater Manchester authorities and the Conservative Government in 2017, a ‘land fund’ worth up to £50 million was pledged by central government to support the development of housing on brownfield sites by paying for the cost of remediation.
  • The Conservative Government has recently reneged on this pledge.

Council condemns the decision by the Conservative Government to withdraw its offer of the Outline Housing Package, which will make the delivery of new homes on brownfield sites unaffordable and force more development onto the Green Belt, a direct contradiction of the Government’s own stated policy.

Council resolves to ask the Chief Executive to:

  • Write to the Secretary of State for Communities and Housing urging the minister to restore the Outline Housing Package to fund the remediation of brownfield sites in Greater Manchester
  • Copy in our local MPs, the Mayor of Greater Manchester, the leaders of the other Greater Manchester local authorities and the Chair of the Local Government Association asking them for their support for Oldham’s position.

Proposed by: Councillor Diane Williamson

Seconded by: Councillor Garth Harkness

Not every disability is visible

The Oldham Liberal Democrats are backing a national campaign to raise public awareness that not everyone who uses an accessible public toilet has a visible disability.  The campaign by the charity Crohn’s and Colitis UK encourages venues with such toilets to install special signage with the logo ‘Not every disability is visible’.

Crompton Councillor Louie Hamblett, who is the Shadow Cabinet Member for Health and Social Care, is raising this issue in a motion to the next meeting of the full Council (September 9). He said:  “This motion is timely.  The requirement to wear face coverings in shops and on public transport has started to raise public awareness that people can be exempted from their use because of a hidden disability.  Accessible toilets, often opened using a RADAR key, are also sometimes needed by people who have a hidden disability.  This campaign is around raising public awareness of that fact to help stop stigma and discrimination, and inappropriate challenges by staff, against those who have ‘invisible illnesses’, such as Crohn’s Disease.”

“The Oldham Liberal Democrats want the Council to ensure that the accessible toilets in our buildings all have this signage and that our onsite staff all receive appropriate training.  We would also like to see retailers and leisure outlets across our borough encouraged to do the same.”

The motion also calls on the Council to install a Changing Places toilet in any new large Council building that opens to the public, and for new and existing Changing Places toilets to be properly sign-posted.  The Government has legislated to make such toilets compulsory from next year.

Shaw Councillor Hazel Gloster, who is backing the motion, said:  “The new legal requirement to provide Changing Places toilets to enable people with invisible disabilities to use purpose-built facilities affording them proper privacy and dignity is very welcome and long overdue.  As a local authority with a duty to serve the public we have a responsibility to ensure that we properly plan for their provision in any of our new buildings.  It is completely unacceptable that people with severe disabilities must sometimes wait hours to be able to access an appropriate toilet that meets their needs”.

The motion to the full meeting of Oldham Council (September 9) reads:

Not every Disability is Visible

This Council notes that:

  • The charity Crohn’s and Colitis UK is encouraging venues providing accessible public toilets to install new signage.  This is to help stop stigma and discrimination towards people with ‘invisible illnesses’ such as Crohn’s Disease and ulcerative colitis.
  • There have been instances nationally where such individuals using an accessible toilet have been accused by staff members of being ineligible to use them.
  • These signs have two standing figures and a wheelchair user with the words Accessible Toilet and the logo ‘Not every disability is visible’.
  • The Government has decided recently that large accessible toilets for severely disabled people – known as Changing Places – will be made compulsory for large new buildings, such as shopping centres, supermarkets, sports and arts venues, in England from 2021.

Council resolves to:

  • Ensure that accessible toilets on Council premises bear these signs.
  • Ask town and district centre retailers and leisure outlets to do likewise with their accessible public toilets.
  • Seek advice from the charity Crohn’s and Colitis UK on the information and training we should provide to Council Staff members.  This is so they understand these illnesses and to prevent potential embarrassment for those who suffer with them.
  • Ensure that any Changing Places toilets in our buildings are properly signposted for visitors.
  • Ensure that the requirement to provide new Changing Place toilets is included within the Council’s future plans for new public buildings in the Borough.

Proposed by: Councillor Louie Hamblett          

Seconded by: Councillor Hazel Gloster                                                         

Let’s all do our bit to tackle litter

The Oldham Liberal Democrat Group has echoed the recent call of Her Royal Highness, The Princess Royal for more local action over litter by tabling a motion at the next meeting of the Full Council (September 9) on the issue.

The campaign group Keep Britain Tidy is organising the Great British September Clean-Up from 11 – 27 September, and Liberal Democrat Councillors Diane Williamson and Sam Al-Hamdani see this as ideal opportunity to get the Council, its employees, local businesses and residents working together to make our borough cleaner.”

Crompton Councillor Diane Williamson, who is proposing the motion, said:  “No one wants  to see litter on our streets.  It makes our neighbourhoods look dirty and unloved.  We want to encourage residents and businesses to join forces with the Council to clear our streets and parks of litter.”

“At a time when many of us may feel powerless and isolated as a consequence of Covid-19, this is something everyone can get involved in, from young to old, and whatever your infirmity, to make a difference in your community.  Even if everyone could just pick up one piece of litter every day during this campaign, it would make such a difference.”

Saddleworth West and Lees Councillor Sam Al-Hamdani, who is seconding the motion, is especially keen to see businesses get involved:  “In our motion, we are asking local businesses to engage with this campaign by signing up as supporters of the DEFRA voluntary code which sets out practical steps businesses can take to reduce litter.  They can also help by sponsoring a local litter bin and public education programmes, especially if they sell products, such as fast food, where packaging is often quickly discarded by customers.  If we can reduce the packaging, educate the customer to throw their rubbish in the bin rather than on the floor, and then provide an extra bin for them to throw it in, so much the better.”

The Liberal Democrats are also keen to see the trial of at least one reverse vending machine in the Borough.  Councillor Williamson explained:  “Several of our large supermarket chains have already trialled these elsewhere in the UK, and it would be great to see one in Oldham.  Purchasers of drinks cans bring them back to store when they are empty and put them into the machine, where they receive a credit note to spend in store on other purchases.  This incentivises customers to bring empties back to store rather than dumping them in the waste or worse still throwing them in a hedge by a roadside.”

The motion to Oldham Council on September 9 reads:

Let’s all do our bit to tackle litter

Council is committed to tackling litter in our Borough and to working for cleaner streets and public spaces across our communities.

Council notes that:

  • The Keep Britain Tidy Campaign offers local authorities the opportunity to become a member of a Network, which provides access to specialist advice and support.
  • Keep Britain Tidy is hosting the Great British September Clean-Up from 11-27 September.
  • The campaign is also promoting a Love Parks campaign and a Charity Bin sponsorship scheme whereby the monies raised from recycling cans deposited in designated local authority bins is contributed to local charities.
  • Several national supermarket chains are now operating trials of reverse vending machines, where customers are rewarded for returning used cans and bottles for recycling.
  • The Government department DEFRA has also previously published a voluntary code for local businesses and local business partnerships to sign up to and reduce the litter that results from fast food businesses.

Council recognises that:

  • Whilst we are committed to tackling litter in our Borough, and to working for cleaner streets and public spaces across our communities, we cannot do this alone.
  • In the battle for cleaner streets and public spaces, we must involve the public and our business partners in a co-operative effort.
  • There are community champions and organisations commendably ‘doing their bit’.
  • The Keep Britain Tidy and DEFRA initiatives provide extra opportunities and an extra incentive for members of the public and business partners to become actively engaged and empowered in tackling the litter which blights our streets.
  • In doing their bit, residents and business will help the Council to make the streets, district centres, parks and public amenities of our Borough cleaner and more inviting to residents and visitors.

Council resolves to:

  • Promote participation in the Great British September Clean-up to members of the public, community, faith and youth groups, and businesses through our social media, website and existing email-outs to partners.
  • Ask the Overview and Scrutiny Board to examine the merits of becoming a local authority member of the Keep Britain Tidy Network, and identify which of the campaign’s initiatives, including Love Parks and Charity Bins, could be introduced in the Borough.
  • Ask the Chief Executive to write to national supermarket chains with stores in this borough asking them to consider Oldham as the location for a future trial of a reverse vending machine.
  • Promote take up of the DEFRA voluntary code amongst our fast food businesses and local business partnerships and seek their sponsorship for the introduction of a Charity Bin scheme and for public education programmes.

Proposed by: Councillor Diane Williamson

Seconded by: Councillor Sam Al-Hamdani