Life

Market Place CCTV update

March 8, 2021

2 minutes read

After a failed attempt to interview someone from Shirebrook Labour Party, I decided to ask a few questions about our town at source- Shirebrook Town Council. As usual- I used the Freedom of Information Act request and after some time I received a reply. Among them- answer about progress on CCTV development at Shirebrook Market Place.

Just to remind you: Labour Party councillors know about this issue for years. In 2016 at a community meeting at Miners Club, they heard this loud and clear- residents want CCTV at Market Place, residents are sick and tired with growing crime. A stabbing incident there, groups of drunk, loud young people and constant antisocial behaviour justify this costly investment. Labour Party accepted pleads and… ignored them. They took 50 years loan and invested in the new Town Hall without a single CCTV camera…

At February 2020 STC meeting this issue came back. One of the Councillors offered to “get the quotes”. 2019 was another year with a record-breaking increase in crime rate, so I wasn’t surprised that this issue somehow came back. It’s March 2021- 13 months past since they finally decided to ask around about costs. 2020 was yet another record year in crime rate rise- that’s why one of the questions in my Labour Party interview was about CCTV. If you read an interview with the Leader of STC- you know that all questions were ignored. That is why I included this question in the Freedom of Information Act request.

Are you ready for an answer? Hold on to your hats… This is it:
“I can confirm that we are in receipt of quotations for CCTV systems and hope to progress this project in the near future.”

Progress! It took only 5 years to find ourselves at the stage of “receipt of quotations”. I will continue to observe this issue and report as soon as I notice another development. It’s not easy since STC changed the usual way to announce meetings and now we have 3-day notice: which for a working person is not enough to plan and request a day off from work. Labour Party, right?

Of course, I asked more questions. For example: in 2016 STC applied to PWLB for 400 000 loan to build Town Hall. The application failed time after time so Labour decided to loan money from Bolsover District Council and repay them if and when they receive money from PWLB. We wrote about it in details in the past. Now we just following to get info on how much we (taxpayers) will lose on refinancing this loan (BDC is 0.75%, the current rate of PWLB is 2.84%). STC is not worried about the increased cost of this loan- if they run out of money they will just increase taxes… as usual… So. What is the progress in 5 years procedure of loan application? Here it is:
“There is no update on the application at present.”

The rest of the questions were about meeting announcements, Mr. Kane inability to answer phone calls, the weird behaviour of two removed councillors and technical issues with the town website, which was resolved after my intervention.

SSylwester Zwierzynski info@shirebrook247.com