Leader's Blog  
    

“Here we go”, you’re probably thinking, “Yet another blog about young people”. To that, my reply would be, “Tough”. I won’t make any apologies for bringing up one of the most important social, economic and, yes, moral issues we face a country every chance I get.
 

Since the beginning of 2016 one of our main goals for Tameside has been to radically overhaul the borough’s leisure infrastructure, both to give residents more and better opportunities to get active and to ensure that our facilities could remain financially viable in the age of austerity.
 

How much does the following cost; 1,000 Royal Marines, 10 F-35 Fighter Jets, 2 Royal Navy Minehunter Ships and 12 Lynx AH9A Helicopters? The answer is about £2 billion, because those soldiers, planes and ships are what the government is planning to cut from the armed forces to cover a shortfall of that amount.
 

Universal Credit isn’t working. The list of people saying it now extends to council leaders across Greater Manchester, local MPs and the Mayor. I fully agree with them, and I’d argue even among this growing clamour of voices, Tameside’s carries a particular authority. We were one of the first areas of the country to pilot the...

Imagine that one day your local school just closed. Permanently. No warning, no notification, no nothing. It simply ran out of money and had to shut up shop. Could you imagine the chaos that it would cause?

A group of people that are often overlooked by politicians but are perhaps one that we should make more effort to listen to were surveyed this month in a study for the British Council. That group of people is the young.

Cast your mind back to December 2008. It was a time when the first iPhones were only a year old, Alexandra Burke won the fifth series of the X-Factor and Benjamin Button was riding high at the box office. OK, I’ll admit that I had to look those things up, but the point is it feels like quite a while ago!

Summer might have drawn to a close, but that doesn’t mean the big events are stopping in Tameside. On the contrary, all eyes were on Dukinfield Town Hall last Friday as the building played host to one of the highlights of the year: The 2017 Pride of Tameside Sports Awards.
 

This week a stark figure emerged revealing the scale of the growing crisis of consumer debt in Britain. £200bn of debt has been amassed on credit cards, personal loans and car finance deals; a level equal to that which was reached prior to the 2008 financial crisis.

Efforts to transform the UK’s energy mix reached another milestone this week after a government auction for energy project subsidies saw successful bidders agree to build wind turbines for the lowest prices ever.