A Northern Spin Town!

by  Andrew Wastling

THIS year's Empty Homes Week (23rd September 2019 - 29th September 2019) has raised national awareness of the latest Government data showing that over 216,000 homes in England have been empty for over six months. In all, over 600,000 homes are currently vacant. We of course all know that we live in the midst of a local and national affordable housing and homelessness crisis. The report ‘Empty Homes in England’ the 2019 edition was published on Monday September 23rd without a solitary mention in our local media outlets.   That in itself tells it's own story of the Mainstream Medias reluctance to speak truth to power or even to maintain the pretence of investigative journalism free of editorial compromise or content filtering at the behest of their advertisers corporate sponsors & invested vested interests.   I could go on but am sure I don't need to especially to readers of Northern Voices.

For those who might have missed it in the local Press the  latest public statistics for Rochdale showing  that there were in 2017 858 long term empty properties.

In 2018 there were 854 long term empty properties , a reduction of just six in twelve months out of a total of available 93,986 properties .

I would just like to ask Rochdale Council how long these properties are likely to remain empty before they are brought back into use to meet the chronic housing need for local families waiting to be re-housed but feel almost certain a reply will not be sent anytime soon. In fact in Rochdale there is not even a mandatory time period for local councillors to reply to a question from their constituents. This tells you all that is needed about local democratic accountability  - There isn't any!

The local housing crisis has got steadily worse and yet those councillors tasked with standing up for their constituents have never been held to account for their serial failures to address the chronic housing shortage . This despite , most reasonable people would think have thought, having a roof over ones head, being a basic expectation from the voters of their council representatives ?

Currently if all of the people currently on Rochdale Councils waiting lists stood one person per step on St.Chads 122 stone steps they would now go up and down our towns historic landmark almost 54 times! That's a total failure of housing policy in my book.

Where precisely are Rochdale Councils priorities in spending over £250 million on town centre regeneration which is supposed to produce a 'magic trickle' down effect to our local citizens many of whom are reliant on food banks to simply ward of malnutrition or becoming increasingly dependent on GP prescribed opiates disparagingly referred to in some quarters as ' hillbilly heroin to numb the pain and blur them into a sense of false well-being?

We are seeing all around us the collapsing failed experiment of Neo Liberalism begun in the 1980's under Thatcher & Regan & transformed under Cameron, May , & Johnson into the kind insane Kamikaze turbo charged disaster capitalism of the present.

Proof, if proof be needed that this spectacularly and repeatedly spun fake regeneration is little more than insidious creeping regeneration is found in the latest publication this week of the indices of deprivation which placed Rochdale as the twentieth in the UK for poverty. It is no accident surely that a staggering 19 out of 20 of local authorities with the highest proportion of neighbourhoods among the most deprived in England are based in the north of the country. Little was made in out local media of the fact that despite millions spent on Rochdale by succeeding councils that The English Indices of Deprivation report, compiled by the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government, assessed the level to which local authorities lack income, employment, education, and adequate housing, as well as the level of crime and services in across the UK and found Rochdale sadly languishing behind once again.

Were Rochdale a state and not a town it would be difficult not to describe it as a 'Failed State' using Chomsky's definition: they suffer from a serious 'democratic deficit' that deprives their formal democratic institutions of real substance. One of the hardest tasks that anyone can undertake, and among the most important, is to look honestly in the mirror.  If we allow ourselves to do so, we should have little difficulty in finding the characteristics of 'failed states' right at home.'

Sound familiar? It does to me. This is a town where many things  people and institutions are quite simply broken.

Fot the official recorded the top twenty areas with the most deprived neighbourhoods in England are:

1. Middlesbrough 2. Liverpool 3. Knowsley 4. Kingston upon Hull 5. Manchester 6. Blackpool 7. Birmingham 8. Burnley 9. Blackburn with Darwen 10. Hartlepool 11. Bradford 12. Stoke-on-Trent 13. Halton 14. Pendle 15. Nottingham 16. Oldham 17. North East Lincolnshire 18. Hastings 19. Salford

20. Rochdale.

These are deeply inconvenient facts for our councillors who would much rather they were discreetly wept under the carpet along with the beggars on our streets who are a glaring testimony to their abject failure as policy makers in our town each and every time one of them engages in conversation with a local voter or shopper.  They all of course as do we all have background stories.  Stories which when you trouble to listen do not paint our council who implemented Tory Austerity though the back door of our Town Hall without even token resistance or our councillors who capitulated without dissent, then voted through cuts to essential front line services  without any real understanding of how those closed local services would eventually impact on community cohesion.  They after all would in most cases not be personally dependent on such public services, be on the receiving end of such hatchet jobs to the social infrastructure and were in any case financially cushioned from penury by over the odds publicly subsidised councillor expenses.  Indeed whilst voting in harsh cuts for the rest of us one  of their first steps to protect themselves in the hard times they knew were coming was to feather their own nests and vote in an inflation busting pay rise in their councillor expenses for themselves. Nice work if you can get it comrades !

Many of our street beggars however were on  the receiving end of over a decade of tory austerity.  Its no surprise they are there on our pavements to anyone who has been follow political and economic events since the corporate elites crashed the economy and then paid off their cocaine bills and balanced their accounts on the backs of the poor .

Whilst  vital Public Services being butchered we simultaneously witness  expensively financed utopian shopping units intrude into the Rochdale skyline ad nauseum across the town centre  clearly someone has found a magic Money tree?  We also see  or more accurately those who bother to look can see  , dystopian near Victorian poverty & homelessness levels increase locally and people in despair frozen like zombies on the new psychoactive substances  (or 'Spice' ) hidden away in the  ginnels alleyways and shadows where the Council spin merchants never go or more to the point don't even know exist . 

A  Freedom of Information Request showed that in 2017 know Rochdale Council recorded 945 homelessness presentations ,205 homelessness advice presentations from people age 16-25yrs for the same period. Whilst in the last quarter the Council recorded 65 homelessness presentations from people aged 16-25yrs. 

We also know that the number of people waiting on the current waiting list for Social Housing is in 2017 now 6,374 households  - this is a crisis that is getting steadily worse , not better. It can not be logical , morally justifiable , or economically viable to have so many properties remain unused for so long,  or to have highly controversial proposals to demolish at least four of the College Bank Tower Blocks whilst we still have so many local families waiting to be housed languishing on waiting list for years.   This simply does not make any kind of sense.

It does however make economic  and environmental sense to bring empty properties into public use since creating homes from empty properties saves substantial amounts of material compared to building new homes, minimises the amount of land used for development and avoids wasting embedded carbon; helping to combat climate change and providing a proactive step our council can take immediately to give some credibility to their recent declaration of a Climate Emergency at the Town Hall. 

Another immediate proactive step our Council could take could take would be  to restore the Council Environmental Sustainability Team they axed due to Austerity measures , retain some of the largest solar panels in the North of England currently on top of the Seven Sisters instead of demolition them and finally recognise and admit publicly that one of the worlds largest & most toxic asbestos dumps in the world on our doorstep should  have alone merited the calling of an environmental emergency in Rochdale several decades ago.

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