Tag Archives: cornwall council

NewsHound

LibLink: Cllr Alex Folkes takes on the tobacco industry

By NewsHound | Fri 16th March 2012 - 2:56 pm

Alex FolkesOn the Local Government Association blog, Cllr Alex Folkes writes:

At a time when all councils are trying to save money, why should an authority be funding both sides of an expensive battle? That’s the case in Cornwall, and many other councils, in terms of the tobacco industry.

On the one hand, in our public health role, we have a duty to work to cut smoking rates. On the other we have pension funds, which are invested for the benefit of our former and current staff and for which members are trustees

…

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Posted in LibLink | Also tagged | 1 Comment
Mark Pack

Cornwall Council tightens up second home electoral registration

By Mark Pack | Fri 9th September 2011 - 10:25 am

Cornwall Council members such as Alex Folkes have been pushing for some time for the council to tighten up its implementation of electoral registration rules in the face of the county’s large number of second homes.

Where people genuinely split their time between living elsewhere and living in a second home in Cornwall, they can register at both addresses (though vote in a Parliamentary election at only one of them). However, there are widespread concerns that many people who register to vote at a Cornish second home are not qualified to do so as they only use it as an …

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Posted in Election law and News | Also tagged | 5 Comments
Mark Pack

“Press conferences are private meetings”

By Mark Pack | Tue 26th October 2010 - 2:15 pm

Cornish Conservatives clearly do things differently as Lib Dem Cllr Alex Folkes has reported:

Cllr Robertson and Council Chief Executive Kevin Lavery held a press conference to announce the proposed budget. Lib Dem Group Leader Doris Ansari went along to hear what they had to say, only to be thrown out of the event because apparently:

“Press conferences are private meetings”

Posted in News | Also tagged , and | 4 Comments
Mark Pack

Is one of these more dangerous than the other?

By Mark Pack | Mon 14th June 2010 - 1:50 pm

To the untrained eye, it may appear that one of these creatures is rather more dangerous than the other and therefore that it may make sense to have rules about keeping one of them which shouldn’t apply to the other:

Tiger and tortoise

However, to the keenly trained eye of a Cornwall County Council officer, it’s a different matter. For, as Alex Folkes reports,

Cornwall Council is forcing a woman who runs a rescue centre for pet tortoises to apply for a zoo licence if she wants to

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Posted in News | 9 Comments
Stephen Gilbert MP

Opinion: A very modern problem – Cornwall Council, Sita UK and the incinerator

By Stephen Gilbert MP | Wed 10th February 2010 - 11:20 am

PFI has created a very modern problem – how should councils manage relationships with contractors when they stretch over decades and involve multi-million pound sums but also remain responsive to political change, advances in technology and moving priorities? It’s a problem that has come to the fore in Cornwall.

In 1998 consultants outlined a vision for Cornwall’s waste management that included incineration. In 2002 a waste plan was adopted by the council. In 2006 the council appointed a contractor, Sita, to run the contract in a £400 million 30-year deal. In 2008 Sita submitted a planning application to build an incinerator in …

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Posted in Op-eds | Also tagged and | 2 Comments
Alex Foster

Daily View 2×2: 28 January 2010

By Alex Foster | Thu 28th January 2010 - 7:08 am

Smoke trails against a black skyGood morning, and welcome to Daily View this morning. 24 years ago, 28 January saw the NASA Challenger disaster.

It’s the date of the death of Henry VIII and the beginning of the Diet of Worms. (If they went to that sort of effort, I hope they lost a lot of weight!)

197 years ago today saw the first publication of Pride and Prejudice and in 1958, Lego bricks were first patented. Today’s bricks still mesh with the original 1958 system.

Birthday bunny hops today go to novelist David Lodge and hobbit-actor Elijah Wood.

2 Big Stories

Boris Johnson to stand down as chair of the Metropolitan Police Authority

Over to the Guardian for today’s first story.

In direct contradiction to his manifesto, Boris Johnson has decided he doesn’t have time to be a writer, a mayor, and a Police Authority chair, and so something had to give.

Tory Troll has a bunch of handy quotes and links on the story.

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Alex Foster

Daily View 2×2: 12 November 2009

By Alex Foster | Thu 12th November 2009 - 7:34 am

Good morning. Today in 1990, Tim Berners Lee published a formal proposal for the world wide web. Today nearly twenty years later, here we all are. And isn’t it frightening that 1990 is nearly twenty years ago?!

2 Big Stories

Labour’s plan for ‘John Lewis’ public services

The Guardian is reporting that the Labour party are proposing mutualising public bodies – and the Guardian thinks the concept of mutualisation will be so alien to its readers that the only way of explaining it is by analogy to John Lewis.

Hospitals and schools would be transformed into John Lewis-style partnerships under radical plans that could form a central plank of Labour’s general election manifesto.

Public sector bodies, which would also include leisure centres, housing organisations and social care providers, would be allowed to take control of their own affairs if staff and users voted in favour.

Quite an amazing change of fortune from the party that has spent the last dozen years increasing Whitehall control over – well, pretty much everything.

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Posted in Daily View | Also tagged , , , , and | 4 Comments
Mark Pack

Postal vote printers mess up in Cornwall

By Mark Pack | Fri 29th May 2009 - 11:06 am

Perhaps the most basic requirement for a local election ballot paper is to the list all the candidates up for election. A bit of a problem then that ballot papers have been going out in several parts of Cornwall with the bottom candidate missing – because the paper was cut in the wrong place by the printers.

As a result, for example, one resident reported that they had binned their ballot paper because they wanted to vote Liberal Democrat, hadn’t found a candidate of ours on the ballot paper and so decided they didn’t want to vote.

The authorities are reacting in …

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Posted in News | Also tagged | 7 Comments
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