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Brown paper envelopes don’t have the best history with elected representatives, particularly when they’re filled with pictures of that representative, but in my case the envelope I happened to find on my desk at the Town Hall wasn’t accompanied by a note demanding payment in untraceable bearer bonds. As part of the plans to redevelop…
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Karen Buck, Labour MP for Westminster North, will be proposing a new law this month which seeks to improve the quality of rented housing. I say ‘new’ because despite two previous attempts the Tories have been doing their best to prevent its passage using some fairly arcane bits of parliamentary process. The fact, as was…
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There’s been a fair bit in the news over the last two days about the size of political parties, with one source within the Conservative Party claiming that their membership has dwindled to around 70,000. That’s one heck of a decline, although not entirely surprising considering that the average age of a Conservative member is…
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Buzzwords come and go quickly in politics. A few years ago, it seemed like not a single sentence could come out of the Labour press office without the ‘cost of living’ getting mentioned. It even reached the point it became a running joke amongst Labour activists and it certainly stopped having much of an impact…
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Happy New Year to you all. At this time of year it’s traditional for people to set New Year’s resolutions for themselves in an attempt to change past patterns of bad behaviour. Unfortunately, as commuters return to work this week, the only tradition the rail companies will be following is the annual rise in rail…
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According to figures from the Halifax, published in yesterday’s Guardian, Crawley saw the fourth fastest increase in house prices in 2018 compared to the whole of the UK. While this may in the short-term be good news for local property owners, Crawley already has one of the worst ratios of average property prices to median…
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A landlord has been found guilty of illegally evicting a couple from their rented property. Mitesh Patel, 44, of Chanctonbury Way, Southgate was fined £1,700 and ordered to pay costs of £3,000 and £300 compensation at Horsham Magistrates’ Court on 18 December for illegally evicting the Crawley couple from one of his properties. A couple…
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Of all the council’s responsibilities, waste probably seems the least interesting. Nonetheless, it’s one of only a few services every resident uses on a regular basis and when things go wrong I certainly hear about it. In Crawley, responsibility for dealing with waste is split, with Crawley Borough Council in charge of collection of the…
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So, Christmas is upon us. Such is the increasingly frantic pace of politics these days that it really doesn’t feel like a full year has passed since the decorations were last up around town. The presence of the ice rink in Queens Square has certainly added something to the Christmassy feel of the town centre…
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Last Monday was the second reading of the Finance Bill, one of several pieces of legislation which come about as a result of a Budget. This was Parliament’s opportunity to make changes to planned expenditure on anything that the Budget got wrong. Labour proposed a simple amendment: instead of cutting the Bank Levy and in…
Peter Lamb for Crawley 