Fossil Free West Yorkshire were out in St George’s Square Hebden Bridge on Saturday 17 September. Armed with dusters and mops to clean up the West Yorkshire Pension Fund, they were collecting signatures for the petition to divest the Pension Fund from fossil fuel companies.
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Calderdale Council is holding a public consultation on the future of the Cragg Vale Junior and Infant School. The Council has decided to close the school building because it is costly to run, maintain and update. They propose three possible courses of action:
A secret process to cut and further privatise NHS services is charging ahead across England. It goes under the name of Sustainability and Transformation Plans (STPs).
England has been divided into 44 Sustainability and Transformation Plan ‘footprints’ which must make huge spending and service cuts and increase NHS privatisation in order to access “transformation” funds.
STPs are being drawn up in conditions of secrecy imposed by NHS England. Their North Midlands Director of Commissioning Operations, Wendy Saviour, told a recent meeting of Shropshire Clinical Commissioning Group:
“STPs are not meant to be published at all. They should not go to Board meetings. Some of them contain very radical things… These are highly political and highly contentious… Once they’re washed off and the national messages are gathered together, they will be published.”
Hebden Bridge residents and business people gathered in St Georges Square at 9am on 12th and 13th August – the start of the grouse shooting season – to protest against the devastation of Walshaw Moor’s blanket bog and other habitats by industrial – scale grouse rearing. They then walked up to Walshaw Moor for a picnic and fun day that included checking the state of the blanket bog. Continue reading
Hebden Bridge people will gather in St Georges Square at 9am on 12th and 13th August to protest the not-so-glorious 12th August, traditionally the start of the grouse shooting season.
It is widely accepted that mismanagement of the Walshaw Moor blanket bogs for intensive grouse rearing has contributed to three severe floods in Hebden Bridge over the last four years, and downstream in the Calder Valley.
Some households and businesses have still not recovered from the terrible Boxing Day flood last year, when the town centre was under up to five feet of filthy water. Continue reading
A secret process to cut NHS spending and services is galloping ahead across England.
If you think this is all a VERY BAD IDEA, please tell your MP and Councillors. And get in touch with Calderdale & Kirklees 999 Call for the NHS (CK999) or one of the other organisations in the CK999 network and help us campaign to stop and reverse NHS Cuts and sell offs.
Sustainability and Transformation Plans (STPs) are the enforcement mechanism to make NHS commissioners, hospitals and GPs carry out, at speed, the NHS spending cuts and increased NHS privatisation that are required by NHS England’s Five Year Forward View, 2015- 2020. Continue reading
The Chief Officer’s Report to the 11 August Calderdale Clinical Commissioning Group (CCG) Governing Body meeting – to be held at Shay Stadium from 2-5pm – states that the CCG is short of money this year, and that the CCG may have to consider:
“more challenging areas for generating cost savings”
eg:
This is what happens when you remove the Secretary of State’s duty to provide a comprehensive, universal health service – as the 2012 Health and Social Care Act did; and then drastically underfund the NHS – as the Coalition and Tory governments have done since 2010.
At their August 11th meeting (2pm, Shay Stadium, Halifax), Calderdale Clinical Commissioning Group Governing Body will face truly chilling facts about the effects of so-called Sustainability and Transformation Plans, which will start to be carried out in October/November this year.
If you think this is all a VERY BAD IDEA, please tell your MP and Councillors. And get in touch with Calderdale and Kirklees 999 Call for the NHS (CK999) or one of the other organisations in the CK999 network and help us campaign to stop and reverse NHS Cuts and sell offs. Continue reading
Cornish busking band Phat Bollard – who caught the zeitgeist at the 2015 General Election with their sardonic song Millionaires – played in St Georges Square, Hebden Bridge yesterday. Earlier in the week they played at the open mic at the Golden Lion in Todmorden and busked in Halifax and Hebden Bridge. Continue reading
A Chinese investment group, Creat, has just bought the privatised NHS plasma supplier from Bain Capital – only three years after the American private equity firm bought the NHS’s Plasma Resources UK from the Department of Health in 2013.
This privatisation evaded Parliamentary scrutiny, as it was announced just as MPs were about to take six weeks holiday.It involved the sale of 80% of Plasma Resources UK’s equity to the US private equity firm Bain Capital for £90m, plus a Bain Capital Investment of an extra £50m in the firm to create a “UK Life Sciences Champion.”
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