Matt
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It seems it’s the developers wanting to overstep their mark as well. 200 houses given permission to be built along a certain part of the A483. Redrow – say they want to build 500 houses. They’ve not got the permission to do so.
It has also become apparent that we don’t need as many houses as the developers are claiming – which means they are just trying to create pressure on local infrastructure and services because they think the council are a soft touch.
If they start building houses everywhere like cowboys – we will need people standing outside the houses saying – look you might think you got a well priced and positioned house but good luck the council ever emptying the bins or providing you with any services whatsoever or having roads that won’t crock your nice cars.
The planning inspector in charge of examining the LDP has stated that local councillors have no right to respond over losing the 800 affordable homes due to a secret deal. However, 10 housing developers will be allowed to speak.
Courtesy of Clr Marc Jones for finding out this information.
So let me get this straight they plan to cut £374,000 from the road maintenance budget annually, but in April they stated there’s currently a £50m backlog of potholes to repair.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-47908714
That’s going to work well then. Is the strategy to instead of worrying about the costs spiralling towards hundreds of millions, we just strike off vast miles of road in Wrexham when they get damaged to the extent that they no longer look or function as roads.
[quote quote=175214]Matt. The Pay As You Go Scheme would be collected when the donor left this earth not whilst still here. Maybe I should have headed it a Pay When You’ve Gone Scheme.[/quote]
Sorry completely missed the context!
Do you mean things like people could book in bin services and pay for them individually? There is a private company in Wrexham (ASH) who will do additional non-council collection day lifts of your bin for £15 a time.
If the council offered a fairer price than that then quite a lot of people would consider paying for it if they produced a lot of waste and then the ones that didn’t want to pay could reduce their black bin waste or haul it off to the skip.
My only issue with this is that it would create a 2 tier system: those who can afford to pay and those who can’t. There are all the council tax exempt houses who would not be able to afford to pay for what the council would effectively be touting as premium services. Would areas with high levels of deprivation be left as smelly rubbish estates?
What else could you put on PAYG? I can see people arguing things like they have no kids/grandkids in school so shouldn’t have to pay for their upkeep. Or if we’re really splitting hairs – nobody paying in is directly responsible for kids taken into care – as a collective we are paying for them.
So my guess is you’d have to have a baseline council tax (massively reduced from what it is now) and then a set of pay as you go options – like a menu.
Again issues here are: i) those who are council tax exempt won’t be able to afford these premium services (do you give them credits for X number of services each year?)
ii) It effectively opens up Wrexham to be mass privatised – If black bin collections became pay as you go and attracted lots of private bin companies as rivals to the council service (e.g. we charge the same but wash your bin as well) then the council could then choose to decide there was sufficient private provision of services (like with busses – haha) and knock their bin collections on the head entirely. Leaving people who really can’t afford to be without a collection service entirely.
Very interesting concept Jimbow as undeniably the council needs new ways of monetising things without removing vital services, but how they’d go about it and whether or not they have the competence and long term commitment is another thing.
Good post Alun, it was my understanding that a percentage of business rates comes back to the council, but what I didn’t fully appreciate was that it has squat to do with the amount of money paid in locally but more to do with the population of a town/area.
This seems like something technically flawed and unfortunately on our local level it is unlikely we would have an ant pissing in the wind’s chance of changing how things are done down in Cardiff in the Welsh Government.
On a hypothetical level it means that in order to have maximum revenue coming into the coffers in Wrexham to spend on services – the council’s Executive can actually play a game that favours Wrexham becoming a commuter town entirely. Because as far as they are concerned as long as developers are adding houses/apartments (and population) to the area it doesn’t matter if Wrexham’s entire retail offering dies a death. In fact it means more space for housing in the middle of town. This is actually incredibly poor for the overall well-being of the town and surrounding villages and rural areas, but they could feasibly get away with it.
They can just continue to approve prime developer land and add in affluent (non affordable) housing and get wealthy commuters from England to buy a house hundreds of thousands cheaper than in the likes of Cheshire and say “Hey guys you can get to Chester, Liverpool, Manchester etc… on the A483 to your job, send your kids to schools in England across the border – look guys cheap houses”. That just leaves the rest of us poor buggers who have been living here most or all of our lives, we can’t afford these shiny new houses, we can’t get on the waiting list for council or social housing either. Don’t worry there’s enough of us paying council tax though so it doesn’t matter that there’s bugger all to do in our once proud town.
You have to ask if there is anyone on the Executive Board who has any sense of pride or legacy about regenerating the town? Pulling in cash is one thing, but imagine if someone had the actual ambition to be Retail friendly and therefore perhaps make Wrexham better than just being little Chester. All I know is there are other larger towns in the UK that didn’t expand to what they are today by becoming a giant housing estate for the bigger cities. They have a bit about themselves as a standalone identity. I think it’s something we once had here but are now sadly losing.
Making somewhere a decent place to shop and live would pull in population too (at a slower pace), but it seems like it’s not the easy option, so they’ll always opt out.
[quote quote=175168]M+S £1500,000,000 in debt
Debenhams £520,000,000 in debt and wants to borrow another £150,000,000
Last one out turn the lights off please![/quote]
Those figures are mad aren’t they – I know internally things in Marks aren’t great, constant threat of store closure means certain staff looking elsewhere for jobs and others have left in case Wrexham is the next store earmarked for the axe. There’s no job security there. To think it’s a cornerstone of the high street, but then again so was Woolies…
Then with Debenhams could well be the case that it could be for the whole chain here today, gone tomorrow.
[quote quote=175154]Changing to three weekly bin collections will save the council £47,000. Opening up the Guildhall Councillor’s Car park to the public seven days a week would create income to match that. Not to mention the £22,000 spent on the unnecessary resurfacing of that car park![/quote]
£47,000 a year is that it? Surely with thousands of households paying in council tax – that could be factored as an increase in the council tax. Spread out across the whole county that’s just a few quid each surely. Would rather swallow a small collective cost than have smelly bins and rats everywhere.
[quote quote=175157]Parking fees don’t need to increase what does need to stop is offering free parking for special events. Why should the ratepayers subsidize the people who attend these events. If you can afford to pay to enter the food festival and shop away, you can afford a couple of quid to park your car. At the moment people who work in the town and keep the county borough going are subsidising other people’s leisure time.[/quote]
That’s ridiculous – the majority of people working in the town are people who also benefit from free parking during their leisure time and go to these put on events. To create a them & us mentality over parking is absurd when you are getting people to fight themselves. I agree it’s a big ask to pay every day to park and pay when you have to work in town but then there’s a cost for most people to work – whether it’s paying commute money to travel farther afield than Wrexham, bus fare, train fare etc… very few people have 0 travel costs unless they work from home, cycle or walk into work.
Bottom line is they know making parking free will attract huge crowds and allow a larger number than usual traders gain a huge spike in income on these events – we usually see street food vendors, specialist market stall traders, amusement and fairground attractions and also town centre shops benefit from all the extra footfall. If the numbers just didn’t turn up because of a parking cost hurdle then they’d knock the event on the head at detriment to all. People would just travel further afield to Oswestry, Chester, Liverpool, Llangollen and take advantage of special events there instead.
The maintenance’ bill totalled £3,400 a year, which also saw the council owned land being maintained. That work is now being stopped although there will be some minor work to stop it becoming ‘a jungle’.
The fences cost £6276 as a one off cost…
It really costs them £3.4k a year to maintain a bit of grass really? I’d like to bloody see the books on that one.
Slow clap for the £6k spent to stop some kids from playing on a field they’ve known their whole lives when the decision isn’t going to be made for 6 months. What are they going to do vandalise the grass?
I’m not being funny but if they build houses in there the whole area is going to be dug up anyway and the So called green spaces probably returfed.
Is some developer going to so say sorry we won’t buy the plot because some beggar has been digging up clods – absolutely ruined!
Glyndwr is really turning out to be a bad egg. They couldn’t have chose someone more condescending and dismissive to locals if they tried on the Wrexham.com article. They want locals to attend this inshitute but they’ll alienate loads of them and accuse them of being Nimby’s. Profiteering at its finest – you can always tell you are hurting someone in the wallet when they come out that negative. Either that or quite frankly they have nobody media trained there.
