Working for a fairer, safer and more sustainable Peterborough

Well, we are back to another round of election this year, our council is currently elected in thirds, meaning where wards have three councillors each is up for re-election on different year and are elected for four years (we have one year in four where there are no scheduled elections locally).

This year we also have the election our Police and Crime Commissioner for Cambridgeshire, more on that later...

Letterboxes will see an increased flurry of political literature in the coming weeks, some from parties you only hear from at election time making promises about how they have a plan for your area and making accusations of other parties on their supposed plans.

The expression caveat emptor comes to mind, which literally means buyer beware. In previous years we have seen the Conservative Party promise a new regional pool (they will probably do so again) what we ended up with is a half-finished hotel and a large increase in the city’s debt, which incidentally is currently running at the £0.5 billion mark racked up over a couple of decades of Conservative administration.

The same Conservatives also promised free Bulky Waste collections for all, they proudly said that it was fully costed and in the budget for the current financial year and yet having been re-elected to run the council it took six months to implement and just a couple of months later was withdrawn due to allocated funds running out.

We have already seen a number of campaigns from the deposed Conservatives which criticise the council, which boggle belief  - Eye Library which was approved on the council’s disposal list by the then Conservative cabinet in July last year (all three Conservative councillors for that ward were on the cabinet at that time), it took until November when the Peterborough Telegraph broke the story of it’s threatened closure for the Conservatives to start their campaign to stop the closure.

The previous council leader recently stood up at a council meeting demanding that the replacement for the Regional Pool should be 50m long and have diving and hydrotherapy facilities included, none of which were part of their proposal for a replacement on the site of Pleasure Fair Meadows Car Park, although that was quietly abandoned for financial reasons.

Don’t get me wrong I was asking about the length being only 25m and the lack of diving facilities at the time, pointing out that even Oundle and Corby have a 50m pools and that the Conservative plans lacked ambition. This was before the Conservative administration closed the city’s hydrotherapy pool facility and reneged on a deal to sell it off to suitable practitioner, stating that they had another operator willing to build a new facility elsewhere in the city.

Sadly, we are still waiting for that to happen.

Last year we were the only political party to publish a manifesto for our city, you can still see it at https://www.peterboroughlibdems.org.uk/manifesto this will be updated in the coming weeks. It will be interesting to see if any other party releases one this year.

Finally please consider voting for our wonderful Liberal Democrat candidates this year, we have a strong record for standing up for our communities and we need more elected members to continue and expand that work for a fairer, safer and more sustainable Peterborough. Please also back our wonderful candidate for Police and Crime Commissioner, Edna Murphy.