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By ROB PARSONS - August 5 2022
Holidaymakers can cancel their expensive trips abroad as it turns out the most beautiful city in the world is Chester, right here in the North.
The perhaps surprising new ranking list says the walled Roman city has the highest percentage of buildings - 83.7% - that align with the 'golden ratio', beating Venice and London into second and third place.
The 'golden ratio', also known as 'the divine proportion', is a mathematical principle dating back to Ancient Greece. Buildings that align with it would contain shapes and structures that have a relationship with each other in the ratio of 1:1.618, as Roland Gent reports for CheshireLive.
For the new study, created by Online Mortgage Advisor, researchers scanned Google Street View for front-facing photos of hundreds of streets and more than 2,400 buildings in historical cities worldwide.
Why we need a recipe for the North, not just short-term ingredients
There were sombre faces all round at the Bank of England yesterday as policymakers warned of the longest recession since the financial crisis, with interest rates hiked and inflation forecast to hit 13.3% by October.
In Northern cities, families are already scaling back their summer plans as they prepare for runaway increases in cost-of-living to take a toll on their quality of life.
But according to Sir Roger Marsh, one of the most influential business voices in the region, the current crisis "has created an even stronger burning platform for the North and all the opportunities it can bring to the national economic performance".
Speaking on The Northern Agenda podcast this week, he says: "Ultimately, what levelling up and everything else is all about is not just economic performance, it's about improving lives, it's about making sure that poverty and deprivation are progressively eradicated rather than just conveniently managed."
The former senior partner at PWC Leeds, knighted last year for services to business, economy, and the community across the North, chairs the NP11 group of Northern Local Enterprise Partnerships. His main focus is ensuring that national political and business leaders see the "North is not a problem, but a national opportunity with a massive prize".
At the moment many parts of the region are at the wrong end of league tables on child poverty, drugs death and inflation rates, while more prosperous areas are able to use their wealth to tackle the same social problems.
Turning the situation around is, he says, a two-decade project where "the scale of ambition needs to be matched by the scale of resources". Currently he says the North costs the public purse a billion pounds more each week in public services than it contributes in taxes, meaning over two decades that's a trillion pounds of lost opportunity.
"When you start thinking about that, and then saying 'Well, it's a £50bn price tag for this, or a £40bn price tag for that', you begin to realise we've got to somehow reconcile these two positions, recognising of course, the fiscal position the country's in."
And adding in a culinary metaphor, he says what he wants to hear from the country's political leaders is that they have a recipe for how to bring this about, rather than simply a list of short-term ingredients like tax cuts.
"And that's one of the things that frustrates me as a business person that always thinks about 'what does success look like? Fine, that's what we'd like. So what should the recipe be? And thereby, these are the critical ingredients', rather than often conversations around ingredients without necessarily knowing to what recipe they've been applied."
Listen to the full podcast interview here:
The man in charge of deciding where public money goes in the last two years is Rishi Sunak - and the ex-Chancellor has made much of his reforms to the so-called Treasury Green Book which determines how it's spent.
The assumption was that the changes were to further the Levelling Up agenda by making it more likely that government departments would spend money in the North rather than London and the South East. But did Mr Sunak actually have the opposite intention?
In a video unearthed by Rachel Wearmouth of the New Statesman, the Tory leadership hopeful is seen boasting to an audience of party members in leafy Tunbridge Wells: "I managed to start changing the funding formulas to make sure that areas like this are getting the funding that they deserve."
He adds: "Because we inherited a bunch of formulas from the Labour Party that shoved all the funding into deprived urban areas, that needed to be undone. I started the work of undoing that.
North West Durham MP and Sunak-backer Richard Holden defended the comments, tweeting that Mr Sunak "tore up [Treasury] orthodoxy with GreenBook changes & sees areas like Co Durham, Teesside, South West etc re-prioritised".
But his words might prompt some questions when the Richmond MP - who trails Liz Truss among the Tory members who will choose the next Prime Minister - comes North for a regional hustings on Tuesday in Darlington.
'He was going to do a 12-hour shift with nothing to eat'
In communities across the North initiatives are springing up to help those left in desperate positions by the cost-of-living crisis. In Dewsbury a foodbank set up during the pandemic has morphed into a “hot food hub”.
Two years ago Labour councillors Nosheen Dad, Masood Ahmed and Gulfam Asif set up the Covid-19 Response Group to distribute food and essential items during the first weeks of the pandemic.
Initially geared towards helping around 200 people in the Thornhill Lees area, it eventually catered for around 6,700 people with food going beyond the Dewsbury borders. Now they have started again and hot food is on the menu.
Local Democracy Reporter Tony Earnshaw visited the Thornhill Lees Community Centre and reports a steady flow of people walking into the site on Brewery Lane. Many were mums with kids. Some stopped for a lunch of hot soup or pakoras, all hand-made in the kitchen. Others picked up essentials: bread, fruit, tinned goods.
“It’s sad that we need foodbanks for hot meal provision, but these are the times that we’re in,” said Cllr Dad. “There’s a real need for it – and this is not the only hub offering hot food in the area."
Cllr Asif added: "I met a guy who was going to work to do a 12-hour shift. He had nothing to eat, no lunch. He said he might be able to get some from his mates. That just melted my heart."
New book explores North-South divide on queer identity
The story of the LGBTQ community is often centralised in London - but a new book explores the queer history from cities that can be overlooked.
‘Queer Beyond London’, a new book published by Manchester University Press, travels to Manchester, Leeds, Brighton and Plymouth, from the 60s to the noughties, looking at their impact on queer life in the UK.
Co-author Professor Matt Cook discusses the history of LGBTQ life and activism in Manchester and Leeds on the Northern Agenda podcast. The academic, who specialises in the history of sexuality, argues that there is a difference between the queer communities in the North and the South.
He tells Dan McLaughlin that there is “a stronger sense of politics, community, and solidarity” in Northern queer communities, compared to the “culture of individualism” in the South.
Professor Cook said: “Brighton, for instance, is a city which has a very low industrial base: it’s much more small businesses, service sector, people running restaurants, cafes, small hotels, and so on.
“Whereas in the North, in places like Manchester and Leeds, there’s much more of that kind of workplace solidarity, which I think breeds a different sort of politics. There’s a different kind of texture to it, I think, in those Northern cities.”
Tough decisions loom in England's least populated area
The start of a new era in Cumbrian politics is only a few months away as two new unitary councils replace the existing system of a county and six district authorities.
But whoever takes over has a potentially daunting set of issues to contend with, as a new report says one of the new authorities - Westmorland and Furness - will need to get to grips with a sparse population and diminishing workforce.
The council will replace Barrow Borough Council, South Lakeland District Council and Eden District Council from April and a shadow authority currently in place is overseeing planning and preparation for the new council, writes Local Democracy Reporter Joe Fletcher.
A report by Dan Hudson of South Lakeland council, says Westmorland and Furness is to be England’s most sparsely populated local authority area, with 62 people per square kilometre.
The area also has ‘an ageing population and a declining workforce’. “By 2043, if current trends continue, it will have 10,400 fewer people of working age,” the report says.
“So it needs to grow its economy, provide housing and employment opportunities to encourage the young to stay, and attract young families, skilled people and wealth creators to locate in the district."
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Mystery of why police's huge child abuse probe was closed down
The shocking 2003 death of Manchester 15-year-old Victoria Agoglia, who reported being raped and injected with heroin by a 50-year-old Asian man, sparked a huge criminal probe with at least 57 victims and 97 potential suspects.
But despite Greater Manchester Police's Operation Augusta establishing a “compelling picture of the systemic exploitation of looked-after children in the care system," it was under-resourced by senior officers and closed down in 2005.
Now 18 years on the police watchdog has been unable to discover why the inquiry was closed down a year after it was started, as Kim Pilling of Press Association reports.
The Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC) started its own inquiry into the decision-making process of Operation Augusta in the wake of a damning 2020 report which revealed the authorities suspected girls aged 12 to 16 were being abused in “plain sight” in south Manchester by Asian men, but nothing was done to protect them.
A “significant amount” of evidence was gathered from witnesses, including officers who worked on the operation and senior social services employees, said the IOPC. However the watchdog said it could not determine who took the final decision to close Operation Augusta in July 2005, nor the rationale for doing so.
It said among challenges it faced were a lack of available contemporaneous records of meetings and decisions, with some former GMP employees unwilling or unable to co-operate.
In better news for the North's biggest police force, it's set to come out of special measures by the end of the year according to the senior officer overseeing its “remarkable” transformation.
GMP became one of six forces to be put in special measures by Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary in 2020 over its poor handling of victims, as Local Democracy Reporter Nick Jackson writes.
But this week Chief Superintendent Rick Jackson, performance and improvement oversight lead for the force, told councillors: “All the signs are – and I don’t want to tempt fate – that GMP will be released from engagement [into special measures] later this year.”
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Northern Stories
Designs for a new ‘flagship’ civic building at the heart of the regeneration of Radcliffe have been pulled after a furious public backlash. Earlier this week, Bury Council released computer generated images of the proposed Radcliffe Hub, which will house the town’s swimming pool, indoor sport and leisure centre, library, a café and health facilities. However, many residents commented that the exterior design of primarily brown metal cladding made the hub ‘look like a prison’ and one dubbed the building ‘the Radcliffe rustbucket’.
A Blackpool councillor suspended by the national Labour Party for anti-Semitism has now also left the council’s Labour group. David Owen is listed as a non-aligned Independent councillor in a move which further weakens the ruling Labour group’s grip on the town hall. Labour lost overall control of the council in July 2021 when former leader Simon Blackburn left the party voluntarily following his suspension, although at the time he said he would continue to vote with his former party.
Greater Manchester’s new buses will be painted yellow rather than the traditional orange and white, says Mayor Andy Burnham. From next year, bus services will be taken back into public control for the first time in decades. The mayor told the Manchester Evening News: “They're going to be yellow. I know the MEN has got many traditionalists amongst its readers that will say, 'orange and white' [should be the colour] and scream when they read that, but you do have to look forward and you can't always harp back."
A network of oyster nurseries set up to help restore marine habitat have filtered almost half a million bathtubs worth of water in just one year. A scheme to bring the native oyster back from the brink of extinction saw around 4,000 of the shellfish suspended beneath pontoons in three estuaries in Tyne and Wear, Scotland and Wales. A mature oyster can filter pollutants out of up to 200 litres of water a day, but their numbers in the British isles have declined 95% since the 1800s.
Tributes have flooded in for ‘formidable’ Stockport councillor Sheila Bailey, described by colleagues as a ‘titan’ of local politics who ‘never stopped fighting’ for people. A Labour politician with a passion for ‘housing, parks and people’, Cllr Bailey was first elected to represent Edgeley and Cheadle Heath in 1990, later serving as a cabinet member. A lifelong Stockport resident, her passing on Wednesday aged 74 has been met with shock, sadness and disbelief by fellow councillors across the political spectrum.
Teenage siblings with significant needs were denied vital support for 18 months by Liverpool Council, a damning investigation has found. The Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman has criticised the local authority for failing to ensure it could connect a family with a provider that could bring about the appropriate support for two children, who have visual impairments and complex communication needs. An investigation by the Ombudsman has led to the council being forced to pay out thousands of pounds in compensation.
