Charnwood Borough Council is consulting on its ‘Core Strategy’. This used to be called the Local Plan and decides where all future housing, employment and other infrastructure will be located in the Borough. It’s a long and very costly process. Clearly there is a need to engage local residents in deciding where they would like to see development take place and equally important where they would not like to see development.

The current consultation appears to consist of trailing around the Borough four boards with information and a couple of officers to answer any questions. Unfortunately some of these are at times when working residents have no opportunity to see them locally.

The Borough has also failed to fully engage the public by hosting public meetings where residents could air their views, have questions answered and where their comments could be recorded instead of having to log on to a website or similar http://localplan.charnwood.gov.uk/

All credit therefore to the Garendon Park and Countryside Action Group, Shepshed Town Council and Hathern Parish Council who have organised such meetings which I have attended and been invited to speak.

This plan is for at least the next 15 years – the voice of the residents must be fully heard.

In the recent debate on the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Bill those Conservatives opposing the measure proposed a wrecking amendment to allow heterosexual couples access to Civil Partnerships. Labour which supports the terms of the amendment in principle had originally agreed to vote in favour of the measure. The Shadow Team were then faced with a dilemma. They could have supported the amendment and watch the Tory rebels defeat their own Leader and pile up more pressure on him. In the end the Shadow Team decided to rescue Cameron and voted against the rebels’ amendment which was defeated. The Government then agreed to Labour’s terms of reviewing whether civil partnerships should be extended to heterosexuals. Much of the press have commented on Cameron being ‘rescued’ by Labour. This isn’t the first time that Labour has rescued the Government and has acted responsibly rather than opportunistically. Labour already looks as if it is the Government in waiting.

Want to borrow money? Do I look like a bank?

Everyone agrees that the economy will only get going if small and medium businesses are given access to funding so as to expand. After the banking collapsed, blamed on banks being to ready to lend to anyone, banks have reined in lending – more so since the Government have told them to hold more money in reserve. In August of last year the Bank of England and the Treasury launched the Funding for Lending Scheme to encourage banks to lend giving them access to £90 billion worth of cheap capital. Banks have taken up this offer of cheap cash but have not passed it on to businesses as intended. In fact net lending fell by £2.4 billion in the three months to December 2012 compared with the previous quarter.
Contrast this with those ‘legal loan sharks’ called payday loans, they’ve grown now worth over £2billion, earning astronomical fees when clients unable to pay on time have to roll over their payments at even higher interest rates. Some of their practices are exposed in a recent OFT report.
A tale of two economies then; businesses unable to get money at low interest rates, the poor swamped with loans at astronomical rates. Time for the Government to do something about both these issues.

We’ve been in some up and down’s economically since 1978. We we’ve seen lots of chancellors come and go in these last 35 years, some good, some not so good. In all that time the financial world had confidence in the UK’s ability to manage its economy. No more! With the loss of the AAA rating, the first time since 1978, that confidence has disappeared – and on George Osborne’s watch.
Keeping the UK’s AAA rating was one of George Osborne’s main goals as chancellor, all the pain he will inflict on us would, he argued, be worth it in order to keep our AAA rating. And there has been pain, with a lot more to come from April onwards.
George Osborne based his own credibility on the retention of the triple AAA rating. Indeed he said in the Conservative Manifesto for the 2010 General Election “We will safeguard Britain’s credit rating with a credible plan to eliminate the bulk of the structural deficit over a parliament.” The loss of the AAA rating shows that the financial world no longer finds his plan credible. And there’s worse news – it also appears that the National Debt is rising and not falling as the Conservatives implied it would.
The value of the pound is falling and we risk facing a triple dip recession because our economy has run out of steam. To get growth not only does the chancellor need replacing but so do his policies. We need new batteries to drive the economic engine forward and to restore our AAA rating.