IT’S 1.30pm on Saturday in Leek and the roads are gridlocked.
Derby Street is like a ghost town and the shops might as well all pack up and send the staff home early.
The Butter Market is empty and there’s only one stall brave enough to have set up in the Market Place.
This on a Saturday, the busiest day of the week.
All this begs me to ask the question: what exactly do we pay our Council Tax for? Not one street, not even one major road has been gritted. The pavements are like ice. There’s not a police car to be seen. Our beloved traffic wardens are conspicuous by their (hopefully permanent) absence. Cars can’t get up even the slightest of inclines and people are sliding around all over the place.
This last month I’ve had to pay a £35 fine (after appeal) for parking on double yellows for oneand- a-half minutes by one of our over-zealous traffic wardens, all of which goes straight into SMDC’s coffers, and I’ve just paid another £45 fine for a summons for late payment of my Council Tax — even though I paid the last two months’ payments in advance.
My appeal letter, which I sent to Mr Chris Hartgrove, head of finance at SMDC, which I delivered by hand on December 22, has gone unanswered, a letter in which I pointed out that £42 of this fine went directly to the council, with only £3 going in court costs.
Every time you open the papers there’s a new round of council cuts. The waste collection bins haven’t been emptied for weeks, probably because the lorries can’t get up the un-gritted streets, and yet I can guarantee that Council Tax will go up again this year.
And for what? So that some over-paid chief executive can get a gold-plated retirement package, or the council can waste £400,000 on some half-baked scheme that will never take off (because they’ve supposedly got no money), while the rest of us mere mortals have to struggle on paying even more money for even fewer services.
Fair enough, it’s the responsibility of Staffordshire County Council to grit the roads, but when its depot is stationed at the bottom of Ladderedge in Leek, you’d think that they could have made some kind of effort. It doesn’t take a degree in physics to realise that it’s going to snow in winter, does it? A large chunk of our Council Tax goes towards the police, and yet here in Leek they’re hardly ever seen — except if you’re doing 35mph in a 30mph zone — because they’re all sent to Newcastle at weekends! We’ve had loads of new signs directing us to our local police station, but it’s never open! We’ve got speed cameras everywhere, not for safety’s sake but purely as ‘cash cows’ to generate even more money in fines. If this is not the reason, then why are there two speed cameras going down Mill Street when there isn’t a house in sight, and hardly any pedestrians, but, surprisingly, no pelican crossing for anyone who does need to cross this very wide road? Talk to anybody out of town and if you mention that you come from Leek I guarantee they’ll say: “Ah yes, that little town with all the speed cameras. We’ve passed through there quite a lot but we’ve never stopped!” Can you blame them if you add to that the sudden emergence of spy cameras around the town, usually situated in conservation areas and usually right next to some our most lovely and well-photographed buildings (ie the almshouses at Compton, opposite the Cottage Hospital and opposite St Edward’s Church)? I begin to wonder if the council thinks that Leek is a hot-bed of secret agents who need to be constantly spied on.
And then there’s the newly-promoted traffic wardens. I was half expecting one of them to jump out and book some poor unsuspecting driver for idling in today’s traffic jams, even though they couldn’t move due to the chaos being caused by the lack of gritters.
There was a photograph in one of the nationals the other day where a motorist had had to abandon his car in the snow drifts and, sure enough, when he went back to his vehicle the next day, it had been clamped! Given the briefing from SMDC that more revenue is needed from the poor motorist in fines to pay for the lack of revenue from our car parks (if you can find one), then these legalised Dick Turpins may be raking in the fines for SMDC, but if they keep on going about it the way they are, then I’m afraid that Leek won’t have any motorists for them to fine, because they’ll be frightened off that much that they’ll just go and shop somewhere else, in a town where people don’t go around hunting in packs, even at night booking motorists for parking outside their own homes. I’ve followed them and actually watched them do this.
Talking of car parks, there’s one at the bottom of Regent Street which the council sold off some years ago. It’s a prime town centre site but it’s now been closed for 18 months.
The new owners ran out of money, but instead of letting the council buy it back they decided to put the footings in for some new building, then, after a week, left it derelict. And it’s still the same today. I’ve been into Moorlands House about this, because it’s in a conservation area and looks like a bomb site, but, yet again, the council has done nothing about it.
Oh how Leek could have done with those extra parking spaces at Christmas! The one success story for the council has been the appointment of Mike Cozens as town centre co-ordinator. He’s done a splendid job at bringing new businesses into the town, even if some of them are charity shops. I was in Macclesfield the other day and half of the shops are empty. I’d sooner look up Derby Street and see all the shops lit up at teatime than to see them boarded up.
However, as a cost-cutting exercise, it now seems that Mr Cozens’s job is on the line just to save a few pounds — and he only works parttime! This to me seems very short-sighted but, I suppose the council knows what it’s doing.
I often wonder if there’s somebody at Moorlands House whose sole job is to find new ways of milking and antagonising the poor townsfolk of what was once a very friendly town.
It seems that whatever the people want then the council will sure as hell do the opposite. A prime example of that was the decision to turn Foxlowe back into a club, when the overwhelming majority wanted it as a badly needed arts centre.
All in all, given the amount that we do pay in Council Tax, I think that we get a pretty raw deal in return, and no matter who we vote for in the next council elections, the council will get in — no matter which party they purport to represent.
Personally, I wouldn’t trust them to look after my goldfish, let alone this lovely little town!
BRIAN THACKER
Address provided
