Cycling and crossing Maghull’s ‘Berlin Wall’

The new (ish) cyclist unfriendly Alt Junction in Maghull

Maghull is very flat so you’d expect it to be perfect to cycle around and yet the busy A59/Northway cuts Maghull in half. I’ve always said it’s akin to the Town’s own Berlin Wall when it comes to cycling and even to some extent walking. I have of course blogged about this matter many times before and called upon Sefton Council to improve the lot of cyclists wanting to cross and cycle safely along Maghull’s great divide. Here’s a link to a previous posting of mine on this matter:-

tonyrobertson.mycouncillor.org.uk/2020/09/03/maghull-lydiates-berlin-wall-the-bible-of-cycling-infrastructure/

I was and for that matter still am unimpressed with the new(ish) Alt junction as, in my opinion, it’s not cyclist-friendly. Expecting cyclists to dismount and then follow the same circuitous route that pedestrians have been landed with at this junction is not encouraging folks to leave their cars behind, in fact, it probably has just the opposite effect!

So, why do I return to this subject now? Well, improvements are afoot as shared-space cycle/pedestrian routes are being constructed on either side of the A59 between the Town Hall/Hall Lane and Damfield Lane junctions. The Damfield Lane/A59 junction, which has a poor accident record, is also being turned into a traffic-lighted one.

So the lot of cyclists is being improved although clearly, an A59 safe cycle route needs to pass through all of Maghull and indeed Lydiate to reach the cycle tracks along the A59 to the north of Robins Island in West Lancs. But don’t be churlish Robertson progress is being made which should be welcomed, and I do indeed welcome the progress.

Here are some shots of the work presently being undertaken at Damfield Lane and along the A59 to the Hall Lane junction:-

Looking towards the Town Hall/Hall Lane junction with the new and widened shared space path.

Elevated view of new Damfield Lane junction layout.

Damfield Lane junction looking north

It will be interesting to see how cyclist-friendly the Damfield Lane junction is when works are completed because from my perspective cyclists should not have to dismount to travel through a junction as seems to be the highway engineer’s want at the Alt junction. Junctions should be designed so that cyclists can go through them safely whilst pedalling not via having to walk.

I’m sure there’ll be much more to comment on as our presently very limited local cycling network is painfully slowly expanded.

Lydiate – Football changing room transformation

I’ve blogged a number of times previously about how Lydiate Parish Council is upgrading its sports/fitness/football facilities at Sandy Lane Playing Field. The works include new additional changing rooms (which should be put in place towards the end of May) and a big refurb’ of the existing changing rooms. Additionally, outdoor fitness equipment has been relocated from LPCs Village Centre Site in Lambshear Lane and land drainage under the football pitches is actively under investigation with a view to resolving water-logging issues as far as possible.

The project is complex and is being supported financially by the Football Assn. One of the significant aims is to get to a position where women’s football is properly catered for. And there’s still another big issue which we need to find a way forward for; turning the tennis courts into a multi-sports area (MUGA) with a much-improved surface, but not everything can be tackled at once.

These two photos show some remarkable progress with regard to the old changing rooms which are being transformed as I type this blog-piece:-

A disability toilet has already been installed and there’s a bespoke fitted out area in the present building for the making of refreshments/a community cafe.

Bootle job losses

Bootle Crest. This version is fixed to the wall of the Council Chamber in Bootle Town Hall.

I spent my whole working life in Bootle as a civil servant, or more precisely as a PCS trade union officer looking after the interests of civil servants, so to see significant job losses in the town in both the public and private sectors troubles me.

It’s a subject I’ve blogged about previously on the back of the announcement of the loss of civil service jobs in Bootle. Here’s a link back to my most relevant posting:-

tonyrobertson.mycouncillor.org.uk/2016/11/05/bootle-yet-more-civil-service-jobs-to-be-withdrawn/

And now things on the Santander front look more than a little gloomy too as the long-promised redevelopment of the former GIRO building in Netherton has been cancelled. The Liverpool Echo has an article on its website – see link below:-

www.liverpoolecho.co.uk/news/liverpool-news/huge-new-75m-santander-bootle-20252021

As I’ve said time and time again, public sector and in particular civil service jobs were brought into Bootle in the 1960s and 1970s to boost job opportunities in a town that was struggling with the demise of the docks and associated industries. To now remove those civil service jobs elsewhere (in HMRC’s case into central Liverpool) makes no sense to me at all. Those jobs and those at Santander will have had a positive effect on the local economy, indeed I’ve often thought that without the thousands of civil servants in Bootle’s mini-Whitehall the Strand Shopping Centre would have encountered serious trading problems many years ago.

Bootle New Strand shopping centre

Removing public sector jobs from Bootle can only make regenerating the town a much bigger job and the investment in jobs that would have flowed from the Santander project makes that tough job even tougher.

As an aside, I also wonder how big an influence the Liverpool City Region is on the sucking of jobs into central Liverpool. My fear is that Liverpool’s gains are at the expense of its surrounding towns…….

My thanks to Roy Connell for the lead to this posting

Lydiate – Tyson’s Triangle to be built on

Tyson’s Triangle – March 2021

It must have been back in the 1980s that the triangle of farmland bounded by Liverpool Road, Kenyons Lane and the A59 (Northway) in Lydiate became known as Tyson’s* Triangle, indeed I seem to recall there was an advertising hoarding up for a while in that company’s name which led directly to it being dubbed Tyson’s Triangle.

And now to bring this all up to date. Not so long ago Sefton Borough Council published its Local Plan which defined land use across Sefton for around the next 15 years or so. This plan replaced what was previously know as a Unitary Development Plan. The major changes with regard to the new plan were that various sites across the Borough were taken out of Green Belt and in effect opened up to development/building. Tyson’s Triangle is one such site.

Readers of this blog site will know that I worked to oppose the emerging Sefton Local Plan during my latter years as a Sefton Councillor (I ceased to be a Sefton Borough councillor back in 2015) for Lydiate but that in the end I and the other environmental campaigners whom I worked with lost that fight.

And I mention this all now why? Well, moves are clearly afoot to press on with the building of 300+ dwellings on the land with a draft site plan of the proposals being made available to Lydiate Parish Councillors this week.

I’ve got past the raw anger I once felt at high-grade agricultural land (which much of the former Green Belt to be built on has been) being sacrificed for building but still feel that both government and council have failed to value some of the best food-growing land in England.

So built upon this site will be no matter what I or anyone else thinks; the die has sadly been cast. The only arguments now are about the site layout, the access roads to it, flooding mitigation etc. etc.

OK, I’m still angry really it’s just not as raw!

* I’m guessing that Tysons were possibly the first developers to have an option on this site should Sefton Council take the land out of Green Belt but if I’m wrong please shout out.

Liverpool City Council – Has no one been reading ‘Kilfoyleonpolitics’?

Liverpool Town Hall

The really surprising thing for me about the damming independent ‘Caller’ report into the workings of Liverpool City Council, is that if Labour’s leaders nationally had taken the time to read Peter Kilfoyle’s blog site Kilfoleonpolitics then they would have known long ago about much of this whole sorry mess. Of course, they may well have read it but decided to brush his concerns under the carpet? If they did it was a big error of judgement.

Here’s a link to Kilfoyleonpolitics:-

kilfoyleonpolitics.wordpress.com/2021/03/13/worse-and-worse/

And here’s the Caller report:-

assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/972756/Liverpool_Best_Value_inspection_report.pdf

And finally here’s a link to the blogsite of Cllr. Richard Kemp the leader of the opposition on Liverpool City Council:-

richardkemp.wordpress.com/2021/03/24/the-damning-report-that-shows-liverpool-to-be-the-worst-council-in-england/

Apart from no one seemingly taking any notice of Peter Kilfoyle the former Labour MP for Walton (and Kinnock’s man in Liverpool during the Militant era) where was the regional media in uncovering this growing fiasco?

OK, to put my comments in context I’m am of course an opponent of Labour as that party has always been too right-wing (yes you read that right) for this old Social Liberal of the left. On that basis, I’m hardly going to be seen as a reliable commentary source about a council-run by my political opponents and I guess that’s the problem Richard Kemp has run into too; the ‘well he would say that wouldn’t he’ response. The trouble is he was right just as Peter Kilfoyle has been. In other words, all this could have been unearthed a few years back but no one was listening or maybe was willing to listen.

LEP’s won’t be missed if they fade away

Firstly, I bet that most folks have never heard much, if anything, about Local Enterprise Partnerships let alone know the purpose they are meant to serve.

I recall when they were being set up as an alternative arrangement to the out of favour Regional Development Agencies (by the Coalition Government) and thought at the time that I was at best sceptical about LEP’s.

That’s not to say the Regional Development Agencies were the right model for encouraging economic development but they were regional and therefore at about the right scale to promote economic activity in my book. The old NWDA (North West Development Agency) was reasonably successful despite it being too arms length from democratic control. And thereby hangs the big issue of how to promote economic activity, particularly in areas of deprivation, whilst keeping a firm grip on the need for such activity to be in the control of local democratically elected leaders.

Here’s Jim Hancock’s view on what may well be the demise of LEP’s:-

jimhancock.co.uk/a-lep-in-the-dark/

The muddle at the heart of this matter has been the relentless pursual of elected mayors on a sub-regional/City Region basis. Readers of this blog site will know I’m no fan of elected mayors as concentrating power in the hands of one person is simply not right to me.

But having set up, or should I say imposed, elected mayors for many parts of England and then channelled economic development money through them hasn’t the government simply undermined their network of LEP’s? Well, it seems to me that’s exactly whats happened.

Devolution for England has been an utter mess for years and goes back at least to the probably well-intentioned tinkering by Blair and Prescot. The problem being that devolution has never been properly defined as you will find in most European countries and has ended up being bits and bobs handed down from Westminster with no coherent strategy.

We remain a centralised democracy with our two major parties being authoritarian of nature, trusting no one but themselves. Until we really grasp the need for regional governance and properly defined devolution we will continue to do things badly.

Will we miss the LEP’s if they wither away? No, not really.

Note: The author was the leader of Sefton Borough Council 2004 – 2011