No Gritting: County Council Must Learn From This Experience
Lancaster and Fleetwood Liberal Democrats | Monday, March 1st, 2010 | View Comments
Stuart Langhorn "Lancashire County Council must learn from this"
Over the past few months we have all suffered from disruption to our refuse collections. During this time Stuart Langhorn spoke with the Conservative run Lancashire County Council regarding an urgent need to review their gritting procedures. Unfortunately so many streetsbecame impassible due to no gritting that refuse collections could not take place.
An excerpt from Stuart’s Leader’s Blog sheds more light on this issue
One thing the bad weather particularly highlighted was the split in services between those provided by ourselves and Lancashire County Council.
Many people assume that because we collect the council tax we provide all the local services – nothing could be further from the truth!
As a district council we keep 13% of the council tax – currently an average of around £185 a year – while the county council keep 74%. The police (9%) and the fire authority (4%) keep the rest.
The county council is responsible for gritting the highways (including pavements) and, while I cannot speak for them, I know that they placed their resources to the places that they thought would be of greatest benefit.
——-
* Reproduced from Lower Lune Valley Focus Newsletter, February 2010