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"...her campaigning against education cuts is good news for parents" - Rachael Ewing, Seedhill
"...her campaigning against education cuts is good news for parents" - Rachael Ewing, Seedhill
Wendy has today written to Robert Calderwood, Chief Executive of Greater Glasgow & Clyde Health Board, welcoming the release of 75 more places for staff parking on a first come first served basis.
Wendy said “Concessions this week are welcome but they do not go far enough. The only way to tackle congestion in local streets and restore staff morale is to allocate more spaces to staff. I have written to the Health Board with 2 better options for allocation the space available. The onus on the Health Board is to listen to its staff and the local community and think again. Read more »
Linwood – End Delays Now
Many of you will have seen the recent media coverage about Linwood Shopping Centre. Revelations, not denied by Tesco, suggest they were deeply involved with Balmore, the previous owners, whose lack of investment and poor stewardship was so appalling from 2001-06 we eventually ran a ‘Boot out Balmore’ campaign, supported by half the adult population in Linwood.
Today almost 2 years after Planning Permission was granted to Tesco for a new Town Centre work has not started. Local lobbying has been sustained but repeated delays have tried the community’s patience to destruction. Read more »
Paisley North politician Wendy Alexander is urging local people to help raise £8m for a cancer charity – by putting the kettle on.
The MSP is backing the World’s Biggest Coffee Morning which takes place on September 24.
This is the 20th year of the Macmillan Cancer Support event and the charity hopes to raise over £800,000 in Scotland and £8m UK-wide. Read more »
Wendy Alexander, along with Douglas Alexander MP and Hugh Henry MSP, visited the Alexander Stoddart exhibition at Paisley museum to pay tribute to the locally based sculptor.
The display, which is open to the public until early next year, will highlight a selection of Stoddart’s monumental works including the small scale model of his design for a monument of William Gallacher, Paisley’s well know trade unionist and Parliamentarian.
Sandy Stoddart is probably the most famous buddie, along with Paolo, working in the arts today. We are lucky to have the Queen’s sculptor, working here in his home town of Paisley. The exhibition in Paisley museum also has a sneak preview of his most ambitious project yet “a national Ossianic monument” on the west coast of Scotland. Read more »
Scottish Labour’s Wendy Alexander has accused the Scottish Government of being all ‘hot air’ on wind power after they admitted in response to a PQ that it has failed to match the support given by the previous Scottish Government to offshore wind technology.
Almost 50,000 people could be employed in jobs related to wind farms off the Scottish coast within a decade, but it could be as low as 1600 without proper investment, according to a report from Scottish Renewables and Scottish Enterprise.
In 2006/07 the Scottish Government and its agencies gave just over £2.6 million to support offshore wind development. The SNP has never matched this figure and it has fallen to £1.7 million in 2010/11. Read more »
Education
School Buses
As you will already know I campaigned hard against Renfrewshire Council’s decision last winter to slash the school bus provision and worked alongside many parents for a reversal of a policy that now expects children, some as young as 11, with heavily laden school bags, to walk up to 6 miles a day. With the schools returning last week and the school buses now gone the Council’s decision is biting.
In nearly all cases there is no direct bus route from home to school meaning two separate buses journeys each way. Many parents are reporting nearly an extra two hours being added to their child’s school day. Read more »
Wendy Alexander has said that the Scottish Government’s election promise to deliver 1,000 extra police officers is set to be been ‘torpedoed by cuts’ after it emerged that Scotland’s largest police force has drawn up plans to cut at least 210 officers by the end of the financial year.
Strathclyde Police have been forced to draw up the plans as it desperately attempts to fill a budget black hole created by the Scottish Government cutting funding to the force by £55m over the last three years.
The proposal for cuts to officer numbers are due to be discussed at a meeting of the Strathclyde Police Authority on Thursday. Read more »
Wendy Alexander has accused the Scottish Government of “staggering hypocrisy” after new figures revealed over 1,100 hospital beds have been cut in the past three years, despite an promises to increase the number.
The figures were revealed by a Freedom of Information request to each Scottish health board. The biggest decline was in NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde, which has cut 333 beds in the past three years. NHS Grampian has cut 180 beds and NHS Highland 162 beds.
Advances in medicine mean patients no longer need to spend so long in hospital and changes to policy mean many more people with long-term conditions are looked after in the community. But in 2006, the Health Secretary Nicola Sturgeon said: “The Labour and Lib Dem government’s policy of cutting the number of beds in the NHS has gone on for far too long. Read more »
As most of you will know by now the Health Board has confirmed its intent to press ahead in early September and has apparently further advertised by holding ‘roadshow’ events. Some attending these have contacted me to indicate their extreme frustration at mere advice on alternative methods of transport to work, including cycling!
You may remember that following my earlier efforts and our meeting at the end of May with health board management there seemed to be a willingness from the Chief Executive to take a fresh look at how to “problem solve” many of the shortcomings of the proposed plans, and I felt the delay of the June implementation plans backed this up. Read more »
Scottish Government ministers have been criticised for failing to make a decision on the upgrade of the A8 despite the fact they have been sitting on the conclusions of two reports, the latter of which was handed over a year ago.
A Public Local Inquiry into the proposals was held in 2008 and the Reporter’s conclusions were formally submitted to the government in October of that year – hence ministers have sat on that decision for over 20 months. A separate report on the M8/M73/M74 improvements was submitted to ministers on 24 July, 2009 – now a year on their desks.
Under the original plans unveiled in 2003, the project to improve the 10km section of the A8 between the M73 at Baillieston and the A73 at Newhouse to ensure a complete motorway between Glasgow and Edinburgh should have been completed by the end of 2010, but Transport Scotland estimates the date for completion is now 2013/2014 (see notes). Read more »
