Tag: Merseyside

ARE LEEDS AND LIVERPOOL AIRPORTS GROUNDED?

 

 

Is it healthy for the northern economy for Manchester Airport to be so far ahead of the others?

 

In Leeds there are fundamental questions over whether the airport is in the right place whilst Liverpool John Lennon is still reeling from the double whammy of losing KLM and some of its low cost business to Manchester.

 

Plans for HS2 have reignited the debate over the location of Leeds-Bradford airport. Leeds Council leader Keith Wakefield has launched a major debate on the future of the city region’s transport system. Nothing is ruled out apparently including a new airport in a more convenient location. A cheaper solution would be a rail link from the airport to the centre of the city. Not surprisingly that’s the solution suggested by Tony Hallwood, marketing director at Leeds-Bradford airport. However he wants support from the city region and wider to build the rail and road connections fit for the 21st century.

 

On Merseyside John Lennon Airport(JLA) has suffered a series of blows. Plans for a tram link into the city began to disintegrate exactly ten years ago. KLM pulled out severing the airports connection to the global hub of Amsterdam. Most serious of all Manchester has been poaching some of the budget airline business that used to give JLA its unique selling point.

 

The other thing about JLA is that the customer experience isn’t always great. I recently hosted Downtown’s programme on City Talk and asked my guests about the decline of JLA. One referred to having to stand in the rain waiting for connections, another said she lived and shopped in Liverpool but the one thing she looked to Manchester for was its airport. She put this down to the danger of the downward spiral of expectation. With services being cut there was an assumption that Manchester would have the destinations so JLA lost out even if in fact the flights were still there.

 

On the same programme Cllr Nick Small called on the airport to go for more full service operators particularly to the Middle East and Turkey and to reduce its dependency on the low cost airlines.

 

Ryanair expected 200,000 new passengers for Liverpool last year but only got half that. Civil Aviation Authority figures shows that JLA was one of only two major UK airports to lose passengers last year.

 

And yet 90% of people living on Merseyside say they would rather fly from Liverpool so it needs to get its act together. The goodwill is there. Talks are ongoing with Lufthansa to introduce services to German cities. Let’s hope they have a positive outcome.

 

THKLSSWCA !

 

No this is not the name of a Polish striker but the initials of The Halton, Knowsley, Liverpool, St Helens,Sefton and Wirral Combined Authority. That’s the proposed name for the new organisation that’s set to help with skills, transport and economic matters across the City Region from April.

 

The tortuous name is the result of sensitivity by some districts to the name Liverpool.

 

I can’t match Frank McKenna’s magnificent tirade on this subject in his special blog this week.

 

Dare I suggest Greater Liverpool Combined Authority? Leeds seems to have settled for the West Yorkshire Combined Authority.

 

What is more worrying is Frank’s information that there are questions over whether Joe Anderson should lead the new body. That’s silly but I hope he doesn’t follow Frank’s advice and walk away. “Merseyside” has suffered too long from these sort of quarrels that are largely absent in Manchester. We need common sense not walk outs.

 

 

 

 

THE LAST POST

The decision to close the Liverpool Post is the latest milestone on a road that could leave us with no printed newspapers at all.

 

In embarking on this subject I have to be careful not to wallow in too much nostalgia about nestling in the armchair with the rustle of the paper and ink on the fingers. I need to acknowledge that the casual swipe of the hand across tablet and smart phone is equally exciting for a new generation informing itself about current events.

 

For it is the largely free access to news at the press of a button that has done for the papers. People liked the instant access provided by the internet revolution and the advertisers have followed them. The huge loss of advertising revenue and the drying up of sales at the newsagent is seeing papers fighting a losing battle to continue in printed form.

 

Alan Rushbridger, the editor of the Guardian, has said that in fifty years people will be amazed to be told that once huge printers rolled off millions of papers at midnight that were them transported by lorry through the nights to thousands of shops. The economics stacked up in the era before 24 hour radio and TV news but not now.

 

I can easily see the total demise of printed newspapers although attempts are being made to keep them going by making them free.

 

So why am I sad to see the Liverpool Post go? Isn’t it just the latest development in communications which began with cave painting and Egyptian hieroglyphics? The monks changed all that with their portable illuminated manuscripts. Caxton disrupted the medieval world with the printing press and Tim Berners-Lee invented the world wide web which so many people rely on now to get their news.

 

I regret the ending of the Liverpool Post for a number of reasons. The parochial one is that the city has lost a publication that was full of great content from its business pages to its investigative journalism headed up by Marc Waddington. Some of this will continue to appear in the Liverpool Echo but that paper has sold its soul to a diet of crime and sensation which gives a very distorted image of Merseyside. That’s the price you pay when you engage in a futile chase for readers. “If it bleeds, it leads” is one of the most odious sayings I have had to live with in my journalistic career.

 

But on a wider front I wonder if there is a danger we are all going to become niche consumers of news. With the tablet and smart phone you inevitably concentrate on the particular story you are interested in. Your eyes don’t stray across the pages and notice something else you might be interested in. You don’t get the whole deal that a newspaper provides between its covers: the news, comment, features, pictures, the crossword and sport.

 

Let’s hope that, behind pay walls, some great journalism survives in the e-newspapers of the future. But they will be competing with the blogs and websites of citizen journalism. What is the truth will become a very pertinent question

 

The people are speaking and newspapers will die. There is no licence fee to protect a high quality paper from market forces. There is such a fee to protect the BBC although some papers, in their death throes, are trying to remove it.

 

A world without newspapers is going to be bad enough. Protect us from the BBC with a quarter of an hour per hour of advertising.

CUT COUNCIL ELECTIONS IN CITIES TO SAVE MONEY

Where ever I go it’s a chapter of woe. In the last few days I’ve been to Winsford, Manchester and Liverpool to witness councils struggling to fix next month’s annual budget against a background of swingeing cuts.

 

The problem with this story is that I’ve been covering this sort of issue for forty years. Councils complaining that these are the worst cuts ever and forecasting doom and gloom for the services people need. This time I don’t think they are crying wolf. The scale of the cuts means that they are having to completely rethink the way they provide services.

 

With health authorities, the police and fire service also facing the same pressure; there is a willingness for them all to get out of their “silos” and talk together about providing us with a joined up service. This may be the only good thing to come from the government’s squeeze on the Town Halls. It was a point I put to Manchester Council leader Sir Richard Leese. He had been explaining to a conference in Manchester that “troubled families” often had thirteen different people contacting them in the past. Now management restructuring and greater cooperation with other agencies would mean one person would be put in charge of a case.

 

It begged the question why hadn’t it been done before? His reply was revealing. Until now public sector bodies had been reluctant to cooperate. The budget pressures facing them all had changed that.

 

So credit Local Government Secretary Eric Pickles with one point, but little else. The man is a disgrace. The relish with which he is stripping councils of millions of pounds and suggesting that savings on providing mineral water at meetings will solve the problem is fatuous. His attack on authorities like Manchester for holding £120m in reserves is frankly dishonest. He knows that this money cannot be spent on the revenue budget.

 

Things are so bad in Liverpool that Mayor Joe Anderson has called for divine inspiration. This week he hosted a summit with the Bishop of Liverpool to protest at government demands that the city reduce its spending by 52% over four years. Mayor Joe has been attacked for forecasting civil unrest if this goes on. The criticism is probably right because the last thing his city needs is rioting but there is a burning sense of injustice among civic leaders from Liverpool to Leeds that the local government financial settlement appears to favour southern councils at the expense of the north.

 

Be that as it may, new thinking is required. Cheshire West and Chester Council saw this crisis coming and on Wednesday night in Winsford they began a series of public consultation meetings (which I am chairing) on their budget plans. They include their “Altogether Better” programme which aims to reduce duplication between agencies operating in their patch.

 

Apart from the general cuts, Wirral Council has suffered historic internal management failures not helped by political instability. There is a proposal on the table to scrap the election of a third of councillors every year and go for an all out election every four years. Sources indicate it may not be approved which is a shame. It would end the confusing system that applies across the metropolitan areas of West Yorkshire, Greater Manchester and Merseyside. It would be better if Leeds, Bury, Wirral etc. had one big election every four years when the future control of the council would be at stake. It would also save money for other services which is what this crisis is all about.

MERSEY POLICE SHAKE UP AND OTHER POLLS

 

 

Next Thursday across the North West you have the chance to brave the dark and the rain to vote for Police and Crime Commissioners(PCC) in the five force areas in the region. These are new posts where power is being given to one individual to hold the police to account on behalf of the public. They will decide how the budget is spent and will develop a plan to tackle crime.

 

Merseyside police could be in for a big shake up if Jane Kennedy becomes PCC there next Friday.

 

The former Labour MP for Wavertree has ministerial police experience in Northern Ireland, so tackling the bloated bureaucracy of the outgoing Merseyside Police Authority should be a breeze. The authority that once chose Norman Bettison as Chief Constable has 29 committees and a posh headquarters in Pall Mall. All that could be set to change if Jane Kennedy wins.

 

If Merseyside voters don’t want the Labour candidate, they have five other options. Paula Keaveney is the former Lib Dem group leader on Liverpool Council but apart from her party’s dire poll ratings she is faced with the challenge of another ex Liverpool Lib Dem councillor Kiron Reid. He explains his defection from the party by stating that PCCs should be independent of party. Liverpool born Geoff Gubb is standing in the Conservative interest, Hilary Jones for UKIP and Paul Rimmer for the English Democrats.

 

In Greater Manchester another ex Labour MP, Tony Lloyd, seems assured of victory. The only question is why the ex Central and Stretford MP would want to give up a safe parliamentary seat and chairmanship of the Parliamentary Labour Party to take on the crime problems of this large urban force area.

 

For the Lib Dems, Matt Gallagher brings 30 years of frontline policing to his candidature. The problem is that his party has been haemorrhaging councillors across Greater Manchester in the last two years. Michael Winstanley represents the Conservatives, Steven Woolfe UKIP and Roy Warren is an independent candidate.

 

The outcome of the elections is less clear in the three remaining police force areas. Labour’s candidate in Lancashire Clive Grunshaw will face a spirited challenge from Tory Lancashire County Councillor Tim Ashton who’s pledging to end what he calls a “softly softly” approach to crime. Afzal Anwar stands for the Lib Dems and Rob Drobney for UKIP..

 

Cheshire may provide the closest contest. A former Assistant Chief Constable for the county,John Dwyer is the Tory candidate. Halton councillor John Stockton opposes him for Labour. Cheshire businesswoman Sarah Flannery is attracting some support for her independent candidature. Ex Macclesfield councillor Ainsley Arnold represents the Lib Dems and Louise Bours UKIP.

 

In Cumbria Patrick Leonard is standing in his first election for Labour. Barrister Pru Jupe represents the Lib Dems, magistrate Richard Rhodes the Conservatives and Mary Robinson is an independent.

 

Crucial to the success of these new Commissioners will be their relationship with their Chief Constables. Under the old police authorities there were major battles between the senior police officers and the authority chairs. Remember Margaret Simey and Ken Oxford on Merseyside and Gay Cox and Jim Anderton in Greater Manchester.

 

Operational matters are to remain with the Chief Constables under the new arrangements, but what is operational and what is a pet project of a newly mandated Police and Crime Commissioner. The potential for conflict is there.

 

 

MANCHESTER CENTRAL BY ELECTION.

 

I had the pleasure of hosting a hustings meeting for the parliamentary by election caused by Tony Lloyd’s decision to contest the post of PCC for Greater Manchester.

 

The Friends Meeting House was full to hear from ten of the eleven candidates standing. Labour’s Lucy Powell is certain to win but most of the candidates put up a good show. I was particularly impressed with the fresh approach to politics of Loz Kaye of the Pirate Party and Catherine Higgins of Respect. While her party leader George Galloway is all about himself, Catherine was all about the people of Hulme and Moss side where she lives.

 

I did get a bit exasperated with Peter Clifford of the Communist League who gave the same answer about the crisis in capitalism to all questions including one on fluoridation!

 

The by election is also on Thursday along with the PCC elections.