State of the Area Address 2006

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On 22nd November councillors and guests gathered after the full council meeting to hear the annual State of the Area Address from Council Leader Cllr Roy Oldham.

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Cllr Jack Davies

Good evening Madam Mayor, honoured guests, Members, Chief Exec and Officers of the Council. You are gathered here tonight to listen to the Area Address and to do that may I ask you to put your hands together for the Civic Leader of the Council, Councillor Roy Oldham.

Applause

Cllr Roy Oldham

Welcome everybody to this evening and I hope that what you hear will be of interest and I'll try and spin it out past the United final whistle, for anybody who does support United because there are sad people who do that but nevertheless I think I should finish before, you may see the second half if you're lucky or unlucky.

It is a problem what we face each year that the Conservative opposition can't attend these activities but we have just one of their members here and I find that again sad that they choose not the participate because they are members of this Council their duties are the same as all of us in looking after the residents and the community at election here so it's their business if they choose to come or not but I do feel that they should take a long hard look at what they're doing whether it's at the budget meeting where they vote generally against everything rather than being selective as this evening they've chosen to be absolutely against everything like I said with the exception of one member. Anyway here we are the state of our area for 2006. Well we've set scene with the priorities for this Council over the past few years and I think we're all aware of where we got to and why we got to with those priorities. We sort out the public participation and communities thinking, what do you think is the most important thing to you once you live in Tameside, what can we do that will really turn you on and of course as you'd expect the greatest element that people have and face up to is crime and anti-social behaviour and it doesn't need to be something that you're actually enduring, it's something that you might be thinking about and elderly people can be excused from that particularly people when you look at the television news coverage and some of the other items on the television you could quite easily persuade yourself that it was completely lawless outside your home and you'd best stay in and it's not true. Most of us will not endure hard crime, most of us may not even endure a great deal of anti-social behaviour in the real terms, but the perceptions are there and we have to deal with that, the environment a sound environment that's the important aspect for all of us, where we live wants to look good where we can visit our friends and relatives, colleagues, business people come they want to see a nice area and so we attempt to do that.

Educational attainment we all want our children, our grandchildren to have the best of all education possible and to do the best for themselves in being educated to make themselves valued citizens and to have a good remuneration so they can have a nice lifestyle after all that's what all of us go to work for in the end to bring home enough money to enjoy ourselves and care for our old people and that then leads you onto job creation and the economic development of Tameside. I think you could easily go outside any day now and look on Ashton Moss or in Denton, Stalybridge or Droylsden all the other towns and see Hyde, extensive changes going on in the business world, commercial world and all to the betterment of it, local jobs are being brought into play, the pay, I think, is now rising, we were a low pay area but I think we're starting to deal with that. Add to those four priorities which are the pillars which we build on, social care, which is absolutely important element, social care and health, all of us are prone to running into difficulty in life and particularly as we age and we need to be aware that social care is a critical and important facility we may call on one day and health as well I know in my own household at the moment with my wife.

Engineering - the thing that makes us get about, the lighting, the roads, the highways all the signals the parts that add up to the infrastructure. Planning and development which many times we do find that things are built don't suit us it sometimes those which are next door to us and we can play dog in the manger. In the main however I think that planning plays a very sound part and some of the structures that have been erected over the last few years have been admirable. Heritage, sport and leisure well they're the underpinning of activities one for the visual aspect of the work in heritage terms, preserving the old buildings the important buildings, putting up street art, again making the appearance of the Borough better and the Sport and Leisure where young people can let off steam and older people can keep fit or enjoy themselves as they choose to do. Hopefully this makes a matrix of what the life of Tameside's about and then you put across our IT facilities which are improving day-by-day with new innovations coming along and Customer Care and not least the learning areas the libraries which now have gone way beyond just being able to access books and one can literally learn how to use the computer and move up to the internet and pick up information or even educate themselves. So again that is a woven-in structure into the recipe which is Tameside. We do this in the Council by having an extraordinary good workforce overviewed by, in my opinion maybe other people may have a different opinion, a very, very upmarket management all that is then brought into being in what is actually is able to do by the political activities and our Cabinet members, our Scrutiny and our Overview our Speakers' panel, Social Care and Health on the Engineering side, Leisure all of that then is put together by in this Council, elected members. The agendas are not just put into print my officers as they might have been thirty, twenty years ago, here we have active elected people participating in the job just as though they were paid members of the Council and employees of the Council. We check on the activities of how that's working, we've got a Citizens' Panel more than two thousand people can be interviewed our District Assemblies draw people in to make their play in critical statements or appreciation. We have partnerships and local area grievance, we have the police and our emergency services which lock into that, Health and Welfare Services and it's all reviewed inside a corporate plan which seeks to deliver a Community Strategic Agreement against those milestones and there we are on course to bring in some two and a half million on a Local Public Service Agreement. And it's worth noting that Tameside Partnership actually consists of a board and eighteen partners who represent seventy organisations and we're busy creating a three year local agreement for them. One of the things that has come in the modern Councils is Scrutiny and I might an older Councillor and having seen what's happened in the past being somewhat circumspect about Scrutiny but I've found it to be extraordinary helpful. We have four of those, Personal and Health, Service with Children and Young People, Resources for Sustainable Communities and a Technical, Economic and Environment we haven't just hogged that to ourselves as a majority party, the Labour party who controls this Council, we shared that out with our Conservative opposition so that it becomes more A political because there's no way of applying to scrutiny and the consequence of that is I believe we get good advice from them, they don't make policy but they help to make policy. They don't make decisions but they help to make decisions and that's a powerful role to have and some of the things that have come out which have influenced us have been quite measurable. The Services for Children and Young People we've had a review of teenage pregnancy and bullying in schools, two very important elements which need dealing with so as to help to preserve people from either being abused or from running into difficulty very early on in age. We've had the children's play examination and we've had maximisation of recycling and waste with additional Section 106 agreements. I applaud the Scrutiny Panels and each of them as they produce their reports can rely upon the fact that this Council will not put them on to a dusty shelf they will be actually taken on board and we're the only Council in the country where a Chartermark has been accredited for excellence in Customer Services so that tells you how good the Scrutiny world has become.

I want to just, kind of enlarge on the four in particular priorities I mentioned crime and anti-social behaviour and we're doing relatively well in this we've reduced theft of vehicles by twenty one percent over the last twelve months and the domestic burglary is down by forty-four per cent theft from the person by thirty-six percent and the robbery of personal property reduced by twenty-seven percent and if you look at the Greater Manchester area our peer group the assessment is showing for the first half of this year that we've had a crime reduction of five percent against a five point eight percent rise in Greater Manchester as an average and that's pretty substantial movements in dealing with that problem. We brought in a side situations domestic violence, violent crime, fear of crime, drug and drug abuse, alcohol abuse, road safety, we've got panels and people who can help you to deal with that, think safe, drive safe, how can people get involved in these things well there's plenty of opportunity to do that and some of the documents that will come out of this statement tonight will have the necessary phone numbers and contacts. We will be doing all be can to create a safe community. We put I can't remember now, but there's a hundred or so watchmen cameras down, these cameras are double cameras and they also have an indicator board that says slow down, this is a thirty mile forty miler per hour zone and that's resulted in quite a massive change and we've halved the numbers of children who've been killed or seriously injured on our roads as a result of bringing in twenty mile per hour zone at schools and the cameras in particular, because the two cameras work in this way, one examines the vehicle and takes the pictures of the car, vehicle or lorry in question is speeding and the other one is a general camera that just looks at the scene all the time. You'll have read some time ago where a guy from Doncaster, so alarmed that he'd been caught on our cameras returned in the evening with explosives and blew a camera up in Hyde, but unfortunately for him our second camera is concealed in a substantially safe place and he was seen to be applying his trade because he did work on the railways joining railway lines together by explosives, chemicals, he was seen and went to prison as a result, so I'm just warning everybody if they think they can bypass our cameras even with explosives and you may be wrong. Our safer from the communities do work in so much that we have a partnership with the emergency services that's the Fire and the Police which works I believe extremely well. In Neighbourhood policing terms we have brought in early through our local police through Chief Superintendent to be brought in early a neighbourhood policing system which was called PACT Partners and Communities Together and these are established in the nineteen wards of Tameside with four quarters of Tameside being the controlling elements of that and they're picking up dedicated Police Officers for community activity, Patrollers, PCSO's and the police are bringing those in gradually because they've got to be trained, we will be getting our fair share of those eventually and where the Police can appoint Special constables which are difficult to get but are useful individuals and they can be brought into the scene so each month Senior Police Officer Manager of the teams will meet in one of the wards or all the wards in a month and will meet community representatives to discuss problems which are arising there and to try and bring to other people's attention what might be done to stop the problem and so the Council to try to magnify this operation we're calling it PACT Plus and the Plus is the enforcement panel which we have which consists of members of the Council and the Chief Superintendent again and others who when they get a call from the neighbourhood policing will be able to bring into activity or action the officers of enforcement which then adds to the neighbourhood policing greatly I believe we're having a secondary call on that because the enforcement panel have an executive consisting of four people and those four people will be able to act on immediate problems so if a neighbourhood Police group have real difficulty which needs dealing with tonight or tomorrow then the executive will be empowered to actually bring in their staff to assist the Police in dealing with the problem. We've put a bid in a joint bid Police and Fire and the TS3C for extra funding in the invest to save group we can increase safety. This again will enable the Council to again increase safety in the homes and I think if we can bring that into being and assure everybody there'll be a lot of people much happier and able to actually go back onto the streets to enjoy themselves either shopping or just having a walk. Moving onto environment and recyclates in the area's appearance we've done everything we can to drive this and I think that we've really reached some good standards. We'll do better because it can always be done better but again we've got to deal with anti-social behaviour this time not from youths causing nuisance but from older people who walk their dogs on school playing fields or sports fields fouling them with excrement and the consequence of some child or person, sports person falling and damaging themselves and the wound getting infected with this material can be extraordinarily dangerous and can be life threatening and therefore it is an anti-social activity to do that and we shall be bringing in actions again people who do that. Notices will go up on certain areas which will say it will be an offence to bring your dog onto them and we will deal quite firmly with people who want to do that sort of behaviour because it's not acceptable.

How do we measure up in the large world well we've got a number of new awards we've got some Green Flag awards and some Green Pennants awards all based on our green space strategy and just to congratulate Martin on Denton's Victoria Park you've held the Green Flag award for six consecutive years so you're doing something right Martin in the park. The following awards this year have been given and there's pennants and flags. Pennants are for community based facilities, Gorse Hall Park, Haughton Green Playing Fields and the Ashton West End Doorstep Green, they've got pennants. The flags went to Werneth Low Country Park, Lymefield Visitors Park, Victoria Park and Park Bridge and clearly again we've been recognised as doing something well in terms of appearance of the Borough. 'In Bloom' our continued success from last year we again won the North West competition and we managed to beat all those upmarket places in Cumbria and Cheshire, Lancashire, and we came first. We were then into the larger cities competition and so these nine mill towns, these rag bags of buildings and all our history went to the national awards system and we came second. We were only beaten by Aberdeen and I'm not saying we were beaten by Aberdeen because it was held in Scotland this presentation and I wouldn't want to infer that at all but we did come second and we won the Silver Gilt medal for all the UK, all the UK, Oxford, Stratford-upon-Avon, all these upmarket tourist towns and cities were beaten by the nine towns of Tameside, which is a phenomenal success if you measure it by any measure at all and you can say right we weren't first in the UK but we're certainly first in England so we'll claim that one.

We received an Environmental Championship award for work in using recyclates; our plastic which now goes to make street furniture and other sorts of material like fencing and it's an important element to recycle and we've done it in style in Tameside in places they've used boxes and plastic bags and things but we've gone generally for wheeled bins where you have a secure facility with a lid on it and you can actually move it when it's full. We've got paper and plastics, we've got ferrous tins and aluminium cans, glass and green garden waste and you can then go and buy some of this back if you want. You'll buy it when you buy a newspaper because it's newsprint they've turned it into, you'll buy it if you buy a plastic form because that's the plastic coming back and you'll buy it if you buy a metal or aluminium object because that's your cans coming back and if you want to go to Bayley Street you can buy compost from them, soil and you can put that back on your garden. Most households now have got at least one recycling bin and many have three and we've reached twenty-five percent, I'm lying there, it's twenty four point seven percent of recycling, twenty-five's near enough. It probably happened between the printing of this document and where we are this evening. The intention is to increase this recyclate rate. We've done an exercise in fifteen hundred properties where we have a managed bin collection you get one bin emptied each week whatever the colour is and recyclates went up to fifty-three percent. If that was put across Tameside it'd be an enormous impact upon our landfill activity and upon the recycling of materials so as to reduce pollutants going into the atmosphere.

We've picked up on enforcing I said earlier The Clean Neighbourhood and Environment Act of 2005 and indeed some of the things which are in it and they're quite strong we now have gating orders and we are empowered to gate off Rights of Way so where we've got people who are trying to stop a small group of people in terraced properties for example because they think having the Right of Way behind their properties that now goes

Littering is now an offence in a private place so if we've got litter in the Arcades in Ashton here they can be prosecuted no longer is it just in the public domain. Anybody who's handing flyers out paper flyers we can stop them because many of those fall on the ground following the distribution of them. The unlawful display placards and an increased penalty for that, transport of waste -you see many vehicles with waste and not netted and the material blows off. We can stop, search and seize the vehicle.

Talking about what we can do with dogs and there'll be a length of lead that you may have them on, none of these long leads wrapped up in a coil where you can let them run twenty feet and stand on the pavement yourself while they foul somewhere else you will be given a length of lead that you may use and audible alarms there will be in this Act of Parliament if we choose to use it a requirement for register for residents to register alarm keys with the Council because in the notified area where nuisances were taking place with alarms that are continually going off and we could designate an area and say right we will have to deal with this if you put the key with us and we'll deal with it. There are a whole range of other activities which we will look at bringing in to deal with anti-social behaviour.
Moving to Education, what a challenge that's been for us and how that challenge has been met with quality staff and management and quality political control. I'll keep these you're able to read all these things on the net or wherever but key stage two is the third most improved in the UK, key stage three Maths, English, Science we're performing better than our neighbours in Greater Manchester and we've got a six percent increase in five GCSEs over the 2005 and we've got no schools entering special measures.

What I said earlier in the Council in answer to Councillor Ambler we've got not only the new high schools being developed, but we've got Lyndhurst Primary. St. Mary's Roman Catholic Primary, Ravensfield Primary, Aldwyn and Hawthorn, Dane Bank Primary, Russell Scott and Buckton Vale Primaries all being rebuilt. Six new children's centres, forty-seven million pounds worth and there'll be fifteen eventually co-located on school sites aiming to provide common systems of working to bring the very young into the educational system. We've got the Cavendish Sports Ground now supported by New Charter Housing Trust and it's a novel arrangement taken not caught up by government now taken up by them which offers a partnership for learning and we've got our Head Teachers and Governing Bodies on board with it our Tameside campus which was set up some seven years ago is a model practice which has helped us to get through the difficult situation of dealing with falling numbers and closing some of our schools and rebuilding them because nobody really comes to terms easily with a school closure but if it's properly thought through, talked through that by the professionals and the politicians who understand it, then it will work for all of us and these schools that we're going to build are not for you and I they're for our children, grandchildren and their children this is for a long time in the future and what's in them and how they're constructed will dictate what they achieve in the future.

So, we've got masses of activities in Education going off which I mentioned in Counsel earlier and I'll come back to these as I summarise them.

Economic development and job creation well it's just like something rising out the phoenix rising out of the ashes when you look at the build in the economic terms when you go to again the township of Hyde or Denton, Droylsden or Ashton and Stalybridge and in particular Stalybridge once we get the area around the railway station sorted out. It is a phenomena which I could not have predicted myself and would not have believed could have happened and a lot of it's come about because of the M60 being completed that's put us on the map that we weren't before now we can reached and we can reach others with the would be tram system the Metrolink eventually coming into the centre of Ashton against the bus station and the railway station these are important transport hubs for bringing people to shop, to work and to enjoy themselves. It's always difficult to run through areas by naming facilities in them because people might feel that they've been left out but I would just like to mention to those who sometimes feel that they're going to be dealt with badly when schools are pulled down, we pulled four primary schools down in Hattersley and a high school and we rebuilt two top mark primaries and a new high school and we walked the election yet we had people who were bitter about it and couldn't come to terms with it but in the end the realisation of the quality of what they were getting for their children, neighbour's children and relatives' children managed to break through just like the sunlight breaking through cloud. It really really did and I believe that if you stand firm on these things like we're doing, you will be rewarded for it. If you're weak and vacillating and you get pushed over you will be punished for it. Look at the portfolio and what's happening in economic development, the Droylsden canalside I don't know if anybody's seen the drawings of it, it's breathtaking, it will be a marvellous facility when it's completed, you may seen the Medlock Centre and Pool again the state of the art facilities.
We need to look at some buildings and some pieces of land for regeneration and rebuild and not least we're looking at Hattersley where we've got the stock transfer completed and we're going to demolish two hundred and forty timber framed properties and rebuild on that site and then do a very comprehensive refurbishment and rebuild generally across the township of Hattersley, bringing in new shops, new civic facilities and leisure facilities and I believe over the next five years regeneration of that area will be something to be proud of, as is St. Petersfield when we look what's happened there in those tired old buildings being demolished and the new construction that's going on to complement our new Courts, our new fire station will be happening in Droylsden as we pull down the one in Ashton. New developments at the Arcades are going to take place on the bus station site and the new bus station will be put adjacent to it. We've got innovator units in Hyde Town Hall which will boost the local economy and we can talk about IKEA until we're blue in the face. The DeVere Hotel Group is building a new facility on Ashton Moss, a new Village Hotel and Leisure Club and we know that a prestigious group of people are looking at many more for potential build, all that comes about because of the future of the transport system once we've constructed the Northern bypass by this Town Hall that will link up with the road across the Moss and onto the M60 and you'll see even a greater booming of what's going on and they're bringing local jobs in, these people are looking for local people IKEA and the like they want to employ our people under good conditions, good pay, and it's important that these facilities are there and when people whine or whinge about IKEA go to Stockport and ask them, ask the Council there would they like it, they tried to get it for seven years and didn't, took us seven weeks so I think we may be the gainers on that one. A bit of traffic congestion to start with, not a problem now, Sainsbury's had a problem - it was just a bit of bad design on how the Policing was working to get people into their site, all sorted out.

Those four priorities of ours and may I just mention because it does strikes us sometimes that people get the wrong end of the stick there's a small overspend in the St. Petersfield development and it's about a million and a quarter pounds and we've got to sort that out but we've put thirteen million pounds of public money into there and it's brought in thirty-seven million pounds of private money, now that's not bad gearing so for another one and a half million I think we've done extraordinarily well out of it and I'd like to add to this part of the statement that the Ashton indoor market which unfortunately caught fire and will be rebuilt has been the subject of some letters from the press lately about how quickly it should be done. Now I can understand the public doing that but the Elected Members or Officers I can't understand because they should be intelligent and aux fait enough to know that these are complex systems whereby you are dealing with an insurance company that wants to pay you as little as possible and that's what they do and in all our walks in life and ways of life and we've got insurance claims to make they minimise their payment and you try to maximise it and there's a debate goes on until you come to some common denominator. Exactly the same here with our insurers, they want to pay out and they say oh you've got a building like that an old building doesn't need Building Regulations you know we all know it needs Building Regulations but they said it so we argue and we don't want to go to court but you're talking about a million pounds of difference between the payout from the insurer and that's worth arguing for so it's held the job up. But we will start rebuilding the Ashton Market on the sixteenth of January, we will start on the sixteenth of January. The capital fund has been made available and we'll do it.

Moving off those priorities but not to neglect the other areas which make this Council work and work on behalf of the community, social care and health, it's an improving service, it delivers high quality and it's a good service care it's classed as serving most people well with excellent capacity for improvement. You've got Lomas Court which has been rebuilt a new facility for people with physical difficulty and in partnership and the word partnership rings through our work now in Local Government we've had all the housing and the Manchester care people. We've been commended by the Department of Health for the development of the care and demand prediction model, a model which could be used universally. Home zoning, where care providers have been positioned in geographical areas where they are known by local people. Supporting People Programme - four thousand people are provided with a very valuable service. We've opened the new Housing Options Centre and the opportunity along with New Charter Housing to meet the homeless target and we're operating from all kinds of facilities, Frederick House and re-positioning Catholic House disabled people with Staly House is in the planning stage. We've got changes which will be happening in integrated systems via Tameside and Glossop PCT and we're taking steps to tackle health equalities. Diet, nutrition or all physical activities, alcohol, substance misuse, sexual health, mental health are key strategies in this group in this area of work and we held the annual Health for Life festival here so we're not doing bad in that part of our service.

Engineering transport it's got a well financed programme for both footpath and furniture. Street lighting we just took a deal with a company where we'll be advertising and bringing a very good income in for just the use of existing steel posts. All the work of Local Authority and community do depend upon good transportation and the service is delivered in that so we're refurbishing the depot at Tame Street. It's going to cost us one point six millions and that result will be a modern system, modern workshop with MOT facilities and vehicle hire facilities and all the other people will be able to lock in there and then salt store for winter gritting. We're using hybrid vehicles and fleet wide telematics to reduce fuel consumption. Everywhere you'll see that we are bringing in traffic calming and that's paying off now as I've said earlier about casualties. We're looking to complete the Longdendale Bypass with its Egerton Glossop Spur and the Ashton Northern Bypass here and although we were disappointed by the use of our money on the Metrolink we are also getting the transport scheme 2009 to 15 with every possibility of bringing that backwards. There will be a public inquiry for the Bypass in May of next year and if we get that under our belt and it's positive then we're in a better position than many of the region's other proposals and we may get a lot forward as a result of that.

I mentioned 'In Bloom' and that's a credit to all our staff again and the dedication of those floral baskets and planters were actually put together and I've paid a lot of regard to people, the community, because I didn't see any of them vandalised. There may have been some I didn't see, but in the main I didn't see much or any damage being done to those very fragile items of flowers, and that's worthwhile thinking about as well. Because I do believe sincerely that the better you make your area in appearance, the more likely people are to behave themselves and we need to bear that in mind all the time. In coordinating services here we're looking at the policing again and use of alleygating and our PACT facility. I'm experiencing opinions on ITT and service transformation is sought and incorporated into many of the networks and we're regarded and listened to by decision makers in IT and highest level of government. We've had a string of visitors coming to see us this year including Government Ministers and fifty events have been held which attracted twelve hundred people. The Prime Minister's delivery Council, we take a his representative there Chief Executive Janet Callender and I think there's only I have to say there's two Chief Executives in the country on that one. We take a lead place in the North West E-Government Group, the local E-Government Standards Body, the Government Connect and North West Standard Centre of Excellence which is a procurement system the latter one for the whole of the north west authorities and we were awarded it because of our ability and competence and we have received a Chartermark which few others Councils have.

In community cohesion again we've got a hundred percent of the services are electronically available via the Council award winning website. Two year residents' opinion survey measured in a very comfortable manner. Our Benefits service works hard to ensure we encourage people to take up their rights and the District Assemblies are bringing democracy of course to people. We have a budget of ten million pounds which they are able to operate on.

In older people terms, there's forty-one thousand people now travelling on the buses and tram and rail for nothing thanks to the Government and thanks to this Council passing on the fund we receive from Government to the Greater Manchester Public Transport Authority and thanks to that Authority for actually putting together a credible scheme which must have brought so much comfort and help to people who are scratching for finance to be able to go and see friends or walk round shops or go on just a bus ride to have a look at Bury or Bolton or other places in the conurbation. We've put a bid in for a million pounds to help maintain older people's independence and we have a partnership with Age Concern and the Council where we continue granting aid for older people.

Sport and leisure - critically underpinning activity for everybody and I always say if you are fit enough the one thing you should all own is a spade and get exercise and do some digging in the garden. That'll keep you fit, it'll make your back bad perhaps now and then but it's a good exercise and if you haven't got a garden and the elderly lady next door has use your spade in her garden it'll cost you eight to ten pounds, much cheaper than a health fitness club at forty pounds a month and probably might do you a lot better but we as a Council do provide many sporting facilities of excellence. We've got eight of these and we're going to put four into our building schools for the future. We've opened a number of facilities this year Oxford Parks Community Building a remarkable piece of community facility, the Medlock Sports and Pool, Lloyd Sports Centre in Hattersley and the Tameside Stadium in Ashton with its all weather pitch.

Heritage and culture - well you must never forget what's behind you once you don't remember what happened in the past you can't possibly predict the future. Because the one thing you do know is what happened, the one thing you don't know is what might happen therefore in my opinion you should preserve your heritage and we do that remarkably well. We've had eight or nine Tameside volumes now drawn up by the Manchester University Archaeological Unit. It costs us a lot of money but they are works of reference and works of like read if you want to do that to tell you about our history over many centuries, thousands of years back right to the modern time and we've as much importance in the building of this nation as any other part of the UK. We are not just mills and not just roads and workshops we've got our history locked into us, our people have fought with King against Kings they've manoeuvred and cajoled, they've been in high places over the century make no mistake and we don't intend to let that loose, we intend to make sure all our people know our importance in our history and we've put a lot of money millions of pounds into buildings which need preserving and would not get preserved if this Council didn't involve itself in capital activity. We're putting extensive public art on the streets. We will doing three more quickly now. Colonel Dukinfield who was the major activist in the parliamentary wars against King Charles in the 17th century. He will be recognised in bronze outside the Dukinfield Town Hall. We're going to put in Mossley a bronze of a mill girl to represent the activities of that township and to recognise the sporting activities and games of Hyde Seal which was a, and still is a swimming club played a great part in the Olympics I think in the 1920's we are going to put a bronze seal, large bronze seal on the site of the old Hyde Baths and round it it will have the names of the Hyde participants who went to the Olympics. So we will on this sort of thing we will remember our people. We're going to do something to remember Bill Sowerbutts because it's forty years ago his first Gardeners' Question Time was done in The Broadoak at Ashton so we will be doing something special on the birthday of that. A guy called Brooke invented tea with how you put tea into a pound or half pound carton it was loose once, you got like with a little shovel and you weighed it on the counter, he decided it would be better and easier to be selling a packet, he was the first guy who started our problems with recycling and waste disposal I suppose but nevertheless he was the first one and our blue plaques we've got thirty or forty of them to remember all these important people. We're going to put three bronze township relief maps up quite substantial a couple of metres square and they'll have on it just like the medieval maps had not like you see modern maps I mean the medieval ones where the building was described as it actually looked that will be on those bronze relief maps and we're doing three now and we'll be doing more in the future. I can go on and wax lyrically about it because it's one of my interesting facilities and hobbies.

Just in passing it might be of interest to the people who are represented from Dukinfield. At Mottram Agricultural Show this year I was talking to the President about the Shire horses and he, out of the blue, said I know where there's a cart that used to be a horse-drawn cart which was the Dukinfield Refuse vehicle in the thirties. So we've tracked it down and it was in a farm in Cambridge rotting away. We've bought it and we're going to refurbish it and he will, that's the President, provide us with Shire horses and a guy who can actually hold the reins because I think it's a bit of a specialist job looking at the size of them, and we put that in our carnivals when it's not exhibited in the Portland Museum and I see Councillor Etchells is smiling at that because he knows a lot about the countryside (laughter). Don't make me say it Roy don't make me mention bulls (laughter).

Right okay finance, our financial position is good. Our Council tax was 2.97 last year and we're going to have it three the maximum is coming in 2007. We recognise that people who pay the funds part of the funds from the Government's grants want the services how they want them at reasonable prices and that's what our intention is, if we can get it lower we'll get it lower but there are small clouds on the horizon which we need to be aware of and the equal pay which is a facility where a lot of low paid Council staff principally women over the past years have not been paid at the same level as their male equivalents in gardening, etcetera and they've taken the case to court where they were successful and now we have to square that circle and they can claim that for six years. It's not peculiar to Tameside; every Council in the country is involved in this - we're talking about multi million pounds of repayments and they have to be repaid in part or full against an agreement with the individuals and that's a difficulty that we have to overcome but no more than Bury or Bolton or Oxford or the Shire Councils any of them, so we will do that. And we spend two hundred and eighteen million pounds a year, that's our running budget that's a lot more money than most companies in Tameside actually handle, and a capital budget of sixty-two million. We've got eleven million pounds of usable balances and we've got a huge amount of reserves which includes the insurance fund but a lot of that will get eaten up in that equal pay agreement and we as we go on trying to maintain low levels of Council tax. We need to start the budget now for that and I'm glad this evening that they've put through the overview panel with the Audit Panel's recommendations so we can start on that. I would say this now again there will be no compulsory redundancy in the borough of Tameside for its Council employees, none. The minute that happens Roy Oldham is not the Leader, nor on the Council because I've seen too many strong men crying because they've lost their jobs and I will never participate in that.

Right okay we get all kinds of back pats on the back for the Pension Fund from our publications and the like there was another one this year but that's part of a system which again I've great emotion for - men's jobs and women's jobs and men's pensions and women's pensions are sacrosanct. You work and then have the right to work, if you have the right to be called to war to defend your country you have the right to work in it and have a salary or wage, you have the right after that period of time to have a pension and that's sacrosanct. It's not socialism it's just downright moral.

Right summarising and I won't keep oh it's nowhere near the match yet (laughter). The primary resourse steering group will overview to Community Panel and the Enforcement Panel will be parting and I've mentioned that and the Enforcement Panel will have its executive consisting of Chief Superintendent Hartley, the Assistant Chief Executive, the Borough Solicitor and the Cabinet Member, they'll be the four people who'll act against emergencies. So we're hopeful that that can respond very quickly to circumstances that come out of the blue. We've put in a bid for seven hundred thousand pounds for this investment to save and that picks up again the Police, the Council and the Fire Service and we're hoping that sixteen thousand homes are going to be involved in this with twenty-six thousand smoke alarms being available and all kinds of other activities and facilities to try and make houses and homes safer for people.

Education - big deal with the new schools and we've agreed with what we're doing and we've got our partners on board. There will be the need to build on some other sites which is cleared of school buildings to bring in capital receipts to build the new buildings. That goes without saying and it should not be missed, but it's about the future for ourselves what we leave to others is important and that will be one of them. We can look down on them from another place or look up as it will be in some of the cases and think well we did a good job there.
In sport, mention what's going on it's good and we're in touch again with the University of Manchester looking to bring in an element called Dig Greater Manchester. It will be led by Tameside and the two Councils Greater Manchester they're hoping will contribute to a large fund where we can do some real archaeological digs to try and discover what lies under the ground from the past.

Sport and Leisure now again the building schools for the future are going to bring into being a lot more sporting facilities because they're not just going to be academic facilities they're going to have to sort out health in the community and it's like they should do it belongs to all of us and not just to academia so it will be an important facility over the next five years.

Engineering - well the Longdendale Bypass is always running into trouble. I happened to mention a hedgehog - I wish I hadn't because there happens to be an Hedgehog Preservation Society I didn't know that. I knew about Tiddleywinks - but I didn't know about this place. I didn't mean it I said if the odd hedgehog or slug gets run over when we build this bypass that will be unfortunate well I'm glad I didn't mention anybody human being run over because that really brought the ceiling down on me. I didn't mean it - I like hedgehogs (laughter). And so to offset the small number of trees that will be lost if successfully Longdendale bypass goes through it, I've had planted just to the north, four and a half thousand new trees which is many, many times more than what the trees will be lost and for those who are green, trees absorb carbon dioxide seventy-five kilogrammes per year each an average tree so we'll doing our bit to do that and I intend, if we get permission from United Utilities as the tenant partners to increase that wood to ten thousand.

So right this is the one I really want to get into, the eco situation and the environment. The in thing at the moment is to see that the world in suffering from what's called Global Warming. Now thirty years ago I remember it was going to suffer from a new Ice Age and I remember in forty-seven the best summer ever followed by the worst winter ever and I've got a picture of my dad and myself looking at some telegraph poles which had snapped off under the weight of ice. So it's a bit of a hit and miss affair the climate and it's important however, that wherever you come from, whatever you think the cause of the global warming or climate change is, you end up at the same place and I believe in saving energy, saving money as a consequence, saving fossil fuels for better things than burning and keeping pollution to a minimum, particularly aerial pollution. So I'm at the same point that the people who believe in this is happening because of that reason and I believe that perhaps because of that. Every thousand years climate change occurs and the graphs can substantiate this from ice cores from Antarctic or Arctic and from trees which are dug out of bogs and can be sectioned they can tell with the ring of a tree what was happening at that time. The big problem we've all got and can do nothing about is that we've got a planet called Earth that doesn't have a regular orbit around the sun. It doesn't go in a circular pattern, it can change to an elliptical one. That can alter the energy arriving on Earth by forty percent. The sun itself is huge hydrogen flare and it's got a million mile long tail on it and it goes round itself it actually orbits itself. The earth doesn't go round in a clear way it wobbles it's at twenty-three degrees at the moment off its axis and it varies between twenty-three and twenty-five degrees. That's why you have Ice Ages or you have colder years and hot years and you can't stop that either. The whole of that process is then affected by the chemical changes on Earth and you've got volcanic eruption and plant life rotting down and you've got carbon dioxide which is more soluble in sea water than it is in the air. Far more CO2 in the oceans than there is in the atmosphere. Then we add to it by our activities. We burn petrol and diesel, we light fires and we make things and all of that then puts an extra spike on the graph and that's the one thing we can deal with, we can eliminate that to the best of our abilities. The report which has come out has allowed politicians to see another way of taxing everybody rather than I think sometimes dealing with the problem. I can't agree with green taxes because it means the poorest end cop it first, they'll have to stop using their cars and flying on holiday and then as it moves up the tree of life the last people on the motorway with Rolls Royces and large cars and we'll be all stood cheek by jowl on buses and that's not fair. If it's going to mean anything and we do want to reduce the pollutants then it should be fair and balanced and maybe a Green Income Tax for everybody so according to how much you earn you pay more but dedicated to this problem of dealing with emissions and the problems of waste. That's only my thought on it, I thought I'd like to let you know it might not be of any use to you but I feel better now I've told you (laughter)

So what can we do, well I'm having a guy from a company who and it's a company that is completely neutral, it's a not for profits company who deal with these sort of problems and he.told us a lot of useful things and he started off just like you'd think you would but sometimes you don't think you would do you? Start at the beginning, insulate, low energy light bulbs, keep your fridge door shut, keep your curtains closed at night, take all your electrical appliances off at the switch on the wall before you go to bed, don't let them cook all night and these things add up to a considerable amount of energy saving, carbon dioxide emissions and money in your pocket.

We went to an eco village a fortnight ago and this company has built seven houses and they put in them a number of renewable energy systems, wind turbines, dual thermal system, solar panels -two types, direct electricity production, heated water production, a combined heat and power unit which is a gas engine very old design sat in the flue of the gas emission and it picks up that latent energy from the effluent coming off the burning of gas and it will drive a motor to produce electricity for your consumption and that's an interesting one it's in its infancy state, but it's a very interesting one. And then they did rainwater harvesting where all the water off your roof was collected, pumped back and produced for toilet purposes, washing clothes all that sort of domestic facility and that again saves a lot of money. That's a star point minimise everything in use that makes sense. Start with recycling let no one not recycle. How easy to walk out if you've got these bins and everybody can have perhaps one, some people in some accommodation may not, but most people can anyway. How easy to put your plastic and glass there, your paper there and detritus in that one and you've done the sorting. If you did that you could save one and a half million pounds of taxpayers' money per year in Tameside, two and a half percent Council tax rise just by putting your rubbish in the right container and you save forty seven thousand tons of carbon dioxide going into the atmosphere while you're doing it. So it's pretty well worthwhile doing for that few minutes it will take you as an individual. We've got the thousand street lights being dealt with as an exercise where we've put in what's called a ballast system and this will attenuate luminosity of the light as the night goes on and that can save another thousand tonnes, tonnage of CO2 and a lot of money for the Council. When we refurbish it we've talked about Hattersley and new High Schools we shall be looking at insulation and renewable energy systems, turbines or solar panels and dual thermal because the earth at ten metres in stays constant at fifteen degrees centigrade, twelve degrees centigrade and will probably give you background water heating for nothing after you've put the capital in, five percent of five degrees in the water.

If we could get everybody to insulate their properties in Tameside that's business, domestic, commercial, twenty seven million pounds could saved in energy costs, twenty-seven million, thousands of tonnes of CO2. You can save five hundred pounds a year by having your cavity wall insulated. We've just done a partnership with British Gas that's the Council, sign up with them now and they'll take fifty pounds off your Council tax bill, that's our partnership. We collaborate with other Authorities in Stockport and ourselves and other Councils in Greater Manchester our waste materials from road planings - the old asphalt, are now going to Stockport where they refurbish it and again we're saving CO2 emissions, we're saving quarrying, transportation and money. Our vehicle fleet - we've found out that the energy saving trust will give us a free inspection of all our vehicles if we've got more than fifty and we have so we've asked them to come and when they do come they'll give us this examination, tell us what we should do to make our vehicles more eco-friendly but we are at the moment using bio fuel which is five percent fat, refined fat with the diesel and we've dealt with our tyres by re-grooving them and our heavy goods vehicle tyres are now lasting four times as long as what they were originally by simply having them re-grooved. Our lighting slipper which takes the place of concrete, redundant concrete street lights saves both on aggregate going to waste because we keep the larger element the base stump in place and slip the metal one, new metal one over it just the column goes. That saves money on transport as well and disposal activities and our standard house light bulbs they're saving if you've got ten in your house you can save a hundred pounds per annum just by having those instead of filament bulbs because filament bulbs I am told produce more heat than light that's why when you get hold of one it will burn you, whereas the low energy are just a folded tube they're actually like a domestic striplight and the gas just ionises so you don't have as much heat but you get as much light.

We're looking at Council buildings to save on electrical consumption. A full exercise is going on there. I've told you about the trees what we're planting and we've obtained in excess of one and a half million pounds so far in grants to insulate homes in the Borough. And we reckon that's going one and a half millions tonnes less of CO2 in the atmosphere.

Following submission by Janet our Chief Executive we were one of the first of twenty-six Local Authorities to be invited to join the Carbon Trust Local Authority Management Programme in May this year. It's now a fully formed member of it and we got a carbon document now a full programme Local Authority Carbon Management Programme of what we're going to look at both as a Council ownership and in the Borough. The intention is clearly to reduce all that we can in recycling. What I intend to do - we have the most excellent Energy Manager who has remained to me a light under her own bushel as I didn't know her until a few weeks ago and she's completely with all this, we're going to form a Council Panel now with Members on it. That will have the authority to carry out all these savings of energy and pollutants. It will report to the Overview and Audit Panel for their inspection and consideration. That'll be the final stop for them to examine what's been done and to look at the programme to see if it's being done and I'm asking the Technical Scrutiny Panel if they will carry out another research activity to add to their recycling and waste one which was quite useful to us so if they can look at this as well then we're on board and then our Energy Manager has come up with quite a nice element. We've got two hundred thousand low energy bulbs which we're going to give away to the public and so we will be preparing a docket for people to get so they can draw their two light bulbs and see that they're just as illuminating as filament bulbs and therefore they may purchase more for the rest of their household. They're very long lasting they last years against the filaments weeks or months, in some cases if I've put them in, days. So that's a taster of what we're going to do in the environment.

So I'll wind up now so you can watch the match. Neighbourhood policing PACT plus, educational attainment for best facilities, borough's space in the buildings and the pursuit of quality occupations, jobs. Social services, care assistants for all age ranges. Heritage a borough wide activity to enhance our streets and open spaces, sport and leisure - to provide the most up to date facilities for all ages, highways structures that provide for all users drivers and pedestrians to proceed in safety with the lowest area of pollution possible, to minimise all waste effluent risings, in order to save on atmospheric pollution, to institute total coverage in domestic waste recycling, reduce waste and materials and financial resources and maximise grants and energy savings that lead to less pollution and less finance being spent. These challenges and a great deal of hard work lies ahead for all of us we have stay at the front of this situation. We have in the past, we will in the future, because we have the management and the staff, the Councillors and the community that supports us so those three items of safe and I'll sum them up in this manner. Safe, clean and green streets, in a learning, prosperous Borough. If you can achieve that lot in one sentence and you can achieve it in factual and actual terms we will have done all the people of Tameside a great service.

I'd like to finally thank all those who participated in making a Tameside the wholesome and desirable place it is and that includes everybody, our Standards Panel, the people who run it, our Legal people, the people are in it, every range and activity I see nothing but the best and I thank them for what they do for this Council and for Tameside to make it the wholesome and desirable it is, your Borough, your living space, your working space, your leisure space, it makes up what is the excellence of Tameside. Thank you.