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twowheelsgood

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Posts posted by twowheelsgood

  1. As I said further up the thread, the steady trickle of faults logged on fixmystreet.com has turned into a veritable flood. It does seem that maintenance of our roads seems to have ground to an almost complete halt - really, what is going on? £20m a year to BBLP for this? Any Councillors care to advise?

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  2. borked is that a word?

     

    Indeed it is. Urban dictionary succinctly defines it is;

     

    To have totally ****** something up. Usually by doing something stupid. Specifically used to describe technology that is broken.

     

    The site is once again unborked, but for how long?

  3. The Holme Lacy site is the subject of a Council 'consultation' at the moment. The site will be sold and the funds put into the schools pot. Oh wait, the consultation hasn't finished yet. Council website is completely borked at the moment so you can't see it anyway!

  4. Just wasted 40 minutes trying to submit a pre-app - twice - jumped through all the hoops, pressed the submit... and ... nothing. Filled in the contact form to complain, pressed the submit... and ... nothing

     

    So, we've no doubt paid spacecraft digital a small fortune and they've jumped in saying "We are experts in understanding your organisation and helping you realise your desired outcomes. That’s our commitment, our passion." Yeah, right.

  5. It's been painted yet again, this time terracotta wall with black shopfront - it looks a whole lot better than the colours allegedly chosen by Planning and left half finished. Obviously they haven't bothered with anything so inconvenient as a planning permission, but hey ho.

  6. I really don't like the new logo. It is not attractive, not friendly. What was supposed to be wrong with the green apple?

     

    We'll never know. Nor will we know the true cost of the new one. We do know it won't make a jot of difference, save to leave us even poorer.

     

    As British Airways found when it changed its plane tailfins, while a rebrand can breathe new life into a company it can all go horribly wrong if it isn't embraced by customers. http://www.businesszone.co.uk/branding-disasters-the-rebranding-of-british-airways

  7. So our preferred partners, BBLP, will have routinely checked this tree and found that it wasn't about to fall over, so why the panic and chainsaws now? Perhaps they haven't been doing their job and haven't looked at it? Surely not. Our previous preferred partners Amey cut down a perfectly healthy, rare and historic tree in Mill Street, a criminal act, which the Council glossed over, so there is reason to question what we are paying for. I don't of course expect any answers.

  8. Whilst not wishing to be an apologist for the council, I do think it is unfair to blame them for the appointment of the head. They had nothing to do with it. It is a free school sponsored by the Robert Owen Group and outside the control of the council. Indeed it took a lot of persuasion to get the school to share basic information, such as names of pupils attending, without which and given the difficulties of some pupils, the basic safeguarding checks could not be completed.

     

    I thought the premise behind the school was sound, but why start at the end of Year 9? Why not at the start of secondary?

     

    I wasn't blaming the Council as I appreciate they are not directly involved in this - the parallel I was drawing, rather badly perhaps, it that Herefordshire Council have a similar track record of employing senior staff with truly terrible ethics and employment history, which is available for all to see by a simple online search. We then end up having to pay for it when it invariably goes wrong. It's all part of the Common Purpose and public service jobs roundabout I know. Self serving in the guise of serving the public.

  9. The first post in this thread back in June 2014 said;

     

    Coincidentally, a Mr Andrew Hubble resigned as principal of an academy in West Walsall earlier this year after it was found by ofsted to be inadequate in nearly all respects including leadership and management.  I wonder if this is the same Mr Andrew Hubble.  And, if so, what the kids at the school have done to deserve someone with that track record. 

     

    It is the same Mr Hubble. 

  10. The Whitecross High School and Specialist Sports College is a PFI scheme and was struggling to cover its contractual costs as far back as early 2014 (£750k pa and rising at 3.6% pa), as reported in the HT. It's pretty obvious that the Council have been taken to the cleaners on this one - the sale of the old Whitecross School site barely covered the cost of one year of PFI payment, and that's before the cost of demolition and site clearance, which the Council paid for as well.

  11. It was owned by Claridge Nursing Homes Ltd who developed the Hampton Grange Nursing Home and others and subsequently sold out to the Rotherford Group. It had a planning permission in 2012 for alterations (now lapsed) and a subsequent application was refused. Since then - nothing.

  12. I use fixmystreet.com to log faults as it is independent and outside Council control - I found that ones logged on the Council sometimes 'disappeared' even though they had not been resolved. fixmystreet.com forward them to the Council. I have an RSS stream that shows newly logged faults on their site (for Herefordshire - it covers the whole country). It usually shows a few logged each week, very often reporting failures of recent repairs. Interestingly in the last couple of months there has been a huge increase in reports, just reinforcing the fact that we are at the tipping point of the complete failure of so many of many of our roads.

     

    Let's not repeat the propaganda coming out of Plough Lane that the Council have no money. They have a guaranteed income of over £300m a year with a guaranteed inflation proof increase each year. No business has that luxury. We pay some of that, some of it comes from Government and other sources. We pay it on the basis that it will provide the services they say it will, although in reality we have no choice but to pay it. 

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