Councillor Roy Oldham Interview
Council Leader - Roy Oldham CBE
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Interview - 21st October 2004
Running Tameside Metropolitan Borough Council with an annual budget of two hundred and fifteen million pounds is no easy task. Eight thousand employees take care of two hundred and twenty thousand residents.
Councillor Roy Oldham has been leader for a quarter of a century and he's seen a huge transformation.
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Running Tameside Metropolitan Borough Council with an annual budget of two hundred and fifteen million pounds is no easy task. Eight thousand employees take care of two hundred and twenty thousand residents.
Councillor Roy Oldham has been leader for a quarter of a century and he's seen a huge transformation.
"Tameside now is understood in all the right places to be a powerful leading edge council. We're innovative, we're strong, we have a good budgeting system."
"We've got some very attractive town centres being developed, for example the centre of Stalybridge where the Huddersfield Narrow Canal passes and this has been refurbished, and the centre of the town has been refurbished as well. "
"We should note that there's a lot of investment from the private sector and that's a quite nice place, your starting to look at more of a continental set up then you are a northern town of England. We've got paved streets, we've got restaurants and bars surrounding it, people can sit out and watch the ducks and geese on the canal which has been raised to street level. Then you've got the totally opposite to that, the wilder side the more peripheral areas of the moorlands, which lead onto the North Yorkshire Moors or on to the High Peak districts and you've got the urban areas where we've got centres of commerce and shopping."
"Ashton's got the third highest footfall in Greater Manchester and visitors and principally they come to look at the centre of the town which is the market and was in particularly the market hall which unfortunately was burnt down."
"Yes we've got a whole range of churches, fine churches which we've spent a lot of money on as a council because the churches themselves are always strapped for cash, so we refurbished maybe a score of churches."
"Then you can come to our museums, we've got Portland museum on the canal and you can come to our Setantii museum in this building which shows the march of time from 5000 BC and then right next to us is the Manchester Regiment Museum which holds more VC 's than any other museum outside the capital city of London."
Plenty has already been done then in Tameside but the next 12 months sees the emphasis on the environment.
"It will be safer cleaner streets, that will mean that we will attempt to make the area more attractive in the streets scene and safer for people to be able to walk on those streets. Its about not dropping litter, about not letting your dog foul the football pitches, its about parking your vehicle in such a manner, because people park on the pavement, that pedestrians and invalids and women with trollies with babies in them can get pass without going in the road. Its about making sure your children are acting responsibly because you've got to stay at the top and like football teams can and I know that well you can slip out of the top league quite easily and so you've got to pay attention to detail all the time so that puts an extra responsibility on us, if we do slip our opposition, our political opposition and those who don't particularly care for us will use that as a club to beat us about the head with."
What about this Beacon Status again its not a phrase I am familiar with a lot of other people may not be familiar with it. What does that mean?
"Well it was again something the government asked us to get involved in and we pick out a particular section of the services and we try and reach targets that are laid down and if we do, we get a Beacon award for that. What it does, it tells the government, the cabinet and the people who are operating the civil service that this council has got some sort of quality to it."
The autumn is always a crucial stage of the authority's year, its time for the Leaders State of the Area Address.
"We're doing financial terms have we got the capital works going on that we thought we would have, are they on target, is everything working properly on the street scene, are the patrollers doing their job, is crime falling, is educational attainment rising and are they saying all those facts and figures the ups and downs of them."
Roy Oldham started out in local government in 1966 the year England won the world cup. He became leader of Tameside in 1980 when it was a whole new ball game.
"When we started we were a non-descript area, we were just a number of small boroughs brought together on each side of the Tame and really not important to the two county towns of Preston and Lancashire and Chester and Cheshire we're their peripheral areas and we've had to really fight to force this lot together over those years and that's the major achievement for me."
"We've got a great programme of refurbishment and a lot of that's starting. We're refurbishing the old town halls like Hyde and Dukinfield. Multimillion-pound refurbishments. We've got a massive new shopping centre in Denton, there's a great industrial estate being built on Ashton Moss. We've got new infrastructure coming in Ashton northern by-pass, we've got the money for that. Were just about to get to the point of putting the Longdendale by-pass in."
Councillor Oldham's one regret is that seventeen years of his term coincided with a Conservative government, this being a rewarding job inspired by his beloved Manchester City.
"If you can tolerate watching City over those years and seeing all the disappointments, you can stay on board this roller coaster as well as a council and you have to be pragmatic about it and very very thick skinned in many cases because the barbs and darts of your opponents and those people who support like Manchester United are pretty fierce but I do note from time to time when there is a football match between the two Manchester teams that City usually come out on top and I feel that's a good premise for me to follow I usually come out on top."