Please click here to sign this petition if you think that Stansted should continue to have banking services.  

News has broken this morning that Stansted’s last bank, Barclays on Cambridge Road, is to close on June 21st. This is bad news for a growing community of residents and businesses. There were three banks in Stansted in previous years. Soon there will be none! More news will follow as it emerges.

Today’s Saffron Walden Reporter sums up the contradiction at Uttlesford District Council on their priorities: tax the poor and help the rich. On a morning when I have had to help out a person who has been unable to afford electricity and food for several weeks, so when given food was unable to cook it, […]

One theme throughout the past seven years of this Uttlesford administration has been to save – to horde money – for a rainy day. Well, the rains are here but the council doesn’t have a single sandbag to its name. All it has is over £7 million spare cash in the bank; a sum that […]

Robin Hood was renowned for robbing the rich to pay the poor. Uttlesford District Council has decided to tax the poor to pay the rich, or at least those of us who can normally afford to pay our taxes. The council is intending to cut the district part of the council tax from April by […]

This morning I attended as a spectator a meeting where it was hoped the final go-ahead would be given for Stansted’s long-awaited health centre. The board of the West Essex Clinical Commissioning Group (CCG) gave the scheme its blessing at about 10 a.m., saying they are”firmly behind it”; BUT they don’t hold the purse strings. […]

Housing executor Julie Redfern published information about the housing waiting list in the Reporter. She also wrote a letter in the same journal “Helping those who are most in need“. Cllr Redfern’s contribution is good insofar as it tells part of the story about the desperate need for more housing. What she doesn’t say is […]

Last night’s council meeting highlighted the contrasting worlds that most Conservatives live in, set apart from other people. THE FIRST TALE “C” is for Chambers – the Tory cabinet member Robert Chambers, who came to the meeting to press for an increase in council tax; not for the well-healed or those of comfortable means who […]

There was a bit of a row at last night’s cabinet meeting. The former and present leaders of the Liberal Democrat group tried to open up debate on what appears may be a case of anti-competitive trading by the council. Councillors David Morson and Lizzy Parr were prevented from discussing item 20 on the agenda […]

I have resigned from Uttlesford’s key internal watchdog, the audit committee. I have been a member of the present committee for two years. I tendered my resignation at last Thursday’s meeting of the performance and audit committee following the latest of many incidents which I feel undermine the trust that the public can place in this […]