Policies for Copeland: Debate starts on CBC property portfolio


One of the good things about the fact that we are having an election for a Mayor of Copeland is that a number of issues which have been ignored for too long are bubbling to the surface. One of them is whether we can get better value for taxpayers from council assets such as the property portfolio.

I have been looking at this as the probable means of implementing one of the policies in my manifesto: last night another candidate published proposals to use them for his.

I am committed to making Copeland BC car parks free after 3pm and funding this by not appointing a political assistant: I have also promised in my manifesto which is now being distributed to look at increasing the number of car parking spaces.

There is a serious lack of places to park near the main shopping areas of Copeland, particularly but not only Whitehaven Town Centre: this has been made worse with the opening of Albion Square as the Ginns which used to provide an effective buffer is now full from early morning with cars which presumably mostly belong to people who work there, or have been displaced from their previous parking sites by those who do.

Copeland BC has more than ten million pounds of property not essential to current operations, some spare, some investment property. Given the council's previous record of finding extra reserves and assets when they belatedly look, it is far from impossible that a mayor who knew what he or she was doing might be able to increase that figure.

My current intention if elected is to look at the council's property assets with a view to disposing of or using some of them to fund or provide more car parking spaces so more people can get into our towns to support local shops and businesses.

I was very interested in the proposal which Mike Starkie, another candidate, put forward yesterday evening to use money from Copeland BC's property portfolio to set up a local power company.

I will be studying the proposals in more details as and when they are fleshed out: we have had far too much "not invented here" in Copeland over the past forty years and I would much rather go back to an older tradition of doing the best you can for the public by pinching the best ideas of one's opponents !

I think it is a really good thing that ideas of how to make better use of these assets are coming forward. Unfortunately we cannot spend the same money twice, and the amount of property which the council holds may not be large enough to make it practical to do both. I think providing more car parking must be a very high priority if we are to get people into Copeland's town centres and regenerate them.

What I am 100% certain of is that both my idea of using money from the property portfolio to provide more parking and Mike Starkey's idea of using it to provide more affordable housing and a local energy company are infinitely preferable to the previous situation where assets worth millions of pounds owned by the local taxpayer were just sitting there with nobody putting forward any useful ideas of what to do with them to benefit local people or services.

Comments

Jim said…
Whilst your ideas are good, and I would agree with your parking ideas. I guess you just have to make it easier for people to get there in the first place. Remove the traffic lights, put in roundabouts. Job done.

if you dont do that then its so much easier for people not to bother wich whitehaven now, I got this far so i may as well carry on down that nice duel carrigdeway to workington, where there are more shops anyway.

You see you have to solve the first things first, parking is a "second thing" getting there is a "first thing"
8:30 pm
Jim said…
just take that hensingham by pass as one example. "I have suffered thus far, but no more", so i go via harringon to workington via 585. not down inkerman that was shut for ages to "improve" it, and all they done was made one lane smaller and put in parking places.

for goodness sake, if if went that way from Meadow road, I would have went through One roundabout, not too bad, then a set of traffic lights, nightmare, then another set of lights, nightmare x2, then another set by coach road garage, nightmare x3, then another set beside morrisons, Nightmare x4, then another set beside the police station Night mare x5, then if i had turned left to park at he multistory, i hit another set, Nightmare x6.

its not hard, its really not.For goodness sake we all have a driving licence we can work it out. Roundabouts just work so much better, leave people alone and they do work it out.

as a tired example, get out of morrisons whitehaven, and then get out of the far busier morrisons workington. They just work.
9:21 pm
Jim said…
Dont care what party you are from, you want me in "opposition". Keeps you on your toes.
9:24 pm
Anonymous said…
Nothing new here, Whitehaven used to have it's own utility companys.
12:14 am
Sean Duffy said…
Whitehaven did indeed have its own utility company. There were over 600 across the UK, and they all worked very well until nationalisation in 1947, where the 600 were reduced to 12 regional services. The new part of this is to pour profits from the company back into the councils funds. Its good to see that Steve has embraced the idea, and realises its potential in offering cheaper bills to consumers and business, while also helping the council.
12:39 pm
Chris Whiteside said…
I think it is a very interesting idea and certainly worth looking at. More than one possible model for such a company, of course, depending on whether we are talking just about distribution or more than this.
1:14 pm
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