Road and canal upgrades proposed for Kidsgrove town centre
Upgrades to roads and canal towpaths have been proposed as part of plans to improve a town centre.A number of projects have been put forward for Kidsgrove in Staffordshire, which also include a community learning centre and office units.The funding would be allocated by the Kidsgrove Town Deal Board, which was awarded money from the government's Towns Fund scheme.Councillor Simon Tagg, leader of Newcastle-under-Lyme Borough Council, said the proposals followed previous projects in the town which had "made a practical difference to people's lives".
"The new proposals are intended to have the same effect, helping residents and businesses take a step forward," he added.The proposal would see improvements to the roads and public realm around Meadows Road, Station Road, Market Street, The Avenue and Heathcote Street.
It would also expand work already being carried out to link the Trent and Mersey Canal to the town centre by improving towpaths and linking to the Kings Academy.Three enterprise units for small businesses would be created at The Meadows and the community learning centre would be based at the Kings Academy.The borough council and Town Deal Board has not yet confirmed how much the projects would cost.
Follow BBC Stoke & Staffordshire on BBC Sounds, Facebook, X and Instagram.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
The Guardian
16 minutes ago
- The Guardian
Why the feverish talk of ousting Badenoch already? Tory MPs know the future looks dire
Back in 1997, the former minister and famous political diarist Alan Clark identified a potentially fatal flaw in the Conservative party's leadership system. No, not the controversial membership vote – William Hague did not introduce that until 1998. For Clark, eloquent reactionary that he was, the problem was giving MPs the vote and formal mechanisms to challenge the leader when the old 'magic circle' was abolished in the 1960s. The problem, as Clark saw it, was that it would turn the question of the leadership into a pageant without end. The press would always be able to speculate about a contest, and MPs looking to puff themselves up would have an easy way to do so. Over time, the party's old norms of internal discipline would, said Clark, be worn away. A quarter of a century on, events lend credence to his depressing thesis. It was once said of the Conservative party that loyalty was its secret weapon; nobody says that today. In the 1990s, Clark could write of the foolishness of leadership hopefuls who missed their chance, waiting for a better shot at a job that had only fallen vacant a handful of times since the second world war; as it stands, David Cameron was the last Tory leader to remain in post for an entire parliament. There is surely no disputing that the Conservative party has become a highly unstable institution, and few institutions benefit from being unstable. But there is a compelling counter-argument: which of the recently deposed Tory leaders did not deserve to go? Boris Johnson fell because he could not command enough support from his MPs to staff a government; Theresa May because she could not steer the government through Brexit; Liz Truss because she tanked the party's economic reputation (and its polling). Whatever you think about Partygate, or Brexit, or the mini-budget, in each case the leader was failing at their most essential function: delivering victory for, or failing that securing the survival of, the Conservative and Unionist party. This is the context in which the current, increasingly feverish speculation about Kemi Badenoch's leadership is taking place. Her supporters can fairly claim that the Tories have made a vice of leadership contests, and that their woman has not yet been in the job a year. Her critics can, equally fairly, make the case that she is failing at the most basic job of any Conservative leader: survival. Last month's local elections were a shattering rout. Overall, the party lost two-thirds of the seats it was defending; in several counties, it went from near-hegemonic control to single-digit shares of the vote. That has shaken complacent MPs out of the notion that if they held on in 2024, they had a 'safe seat'; many have also just lost the councillors who formed the core of their local activist base. Were next year's elections to play out the same way, the Conservative machine would be disembowelled across another broad swath of England. Worse still, it could suffer humiliating reversals in Edinburgh and Cardiff. Across much of mainland Britain, the Tories would suddenly be in a potentially fatal position: no longer being the most plausible rightwing option on the ballot paper. Badenoch's allies insist that she needs time to turn the ship around. That was always an argument with a clock on it, but it has been worn thinner still by the brutal fact that the Conservatives have actually started going backwards. In May, the party actually under-polled last year's (already catastrophic) general election performance. The polls also tell their own story. Prior to the conclusion of the leadership contest in November, the Tories' share was rising as Labour's fell. Almost immediately afterwards, its polling went into a nosedive – with Reform UK the main beneficiary. Fairly or unfairly, the balance of opinion inside the party seems to be not whether there will be a challenge to Badenoch's leadership, but when. The most obvious opening is in November, when she marks her first anniversary as leader: the point at which the party's rules stop protecting a new leader from being challenged. The window of maximum danger runs from then until next May's local elections and their aftermath; if she survives that, it's harder to imagine MPs finding the will to depose her later. But the Conservative party's internal rules are much more flexible than Labour's. That one-year immunity from challenge? It's just a rule of the 1922 Committee of backbench Tory MPs, and they can change it. If the parliamentary party gets its heart set on removing a leader, it can. With such a shrunken parliamentary party, the threshold of letters to the 1922 chairman needed to trigger a contest is lower than it was in the comparative salad days of the last parliament. Yet both wings of the party took heavy punishment at the general election, and the current balance of the parliamentary party favours neither. Badenoch won last November by consolidating her own supporters with the anti-Robert Jenrick vote. The key question is whether that second group will decide to move, either because of a plausible challenge from one of their own (James Cleverly 2.0?), or because Jenrick starts to look like the lesser of two evils – a possibility Badenoch increases every time she inches towards his positions on issues such as the European convention on human rights. Whether a new leader will save the party is another question entirely. The Tory party was once described as an absolute monarchy moderated by regicide; today, it increasingly resembles a state of absolute regicide. Henry Hill is deputy editor of ConservativeHome
BBC News
17 minutes ago
- BBC News
Sutton Coldfield man jailed over luxury car theft conspiracy
A man has been jailed for his role in a conspiracy which saw more than £650,000 worth of luxury cars stolen. Hugh Bradley, also known as Hughie Bradley or Hughie Das, bought relay kits from contacts in Poland that allowed him to start cars without their keys, West Midlands Police said. The cars would then be taken to different sites in Essex with the intention of sending them on to countries in Africa. Bradley, 31, from Sutton Coldfield, was jailed for eight years and nine months after pleading guilty to charges of conspiracy to steal a motor vehicle and conspiracy to handle stolen goods. He had been linked to a number of relay thefts in the West Midlands and had also helped to steal cars from across the country, police of Langley Heath Drive, was sentenced at Birmingham Crown Court on 30 May, after being arrested and charged last November. Bradley was spotted on CCTV in Essex and caught when he used his own car, a VW Golf, to drive in convoy with some of the stolen cars, the West Midlands force said Bradley had filmed himself carrying out reconnaissance of houses where luxury SUVs were parked, while messages showed he had paid £25,000 for one of the relay kits he bought from used Snapchat to contact criminal associates and arrange onward sales of the cars, the force stolen cars were valued at £654,664, after an investigation was carried out with Essex Police and Hertfordshire was given a sentence of six years and nine months for one charge of conspiracy to handle stolen was also sentenced to six years in total for two charges of conspiracy to steal a motor vehicle, four years of which will be served concurrently. Follow BBC Birmingham on BBC Sounds, Facebook, X and Instagram.
BBC News
17 minutes ago
- BBC News
Crewe and Sandbach: Man, 71, dies after M6 crash
A man has died after being injured in a crash on the M6 in 71-year-old was driving a Volkswagen Transporter van between junctions 16 for Crewe and 17 for Sandbach when the vehicle was involved in a crash with an unknown vehicle at about 06:15 BST on 23 man suffered serious injuries and was taken to hospital where he had since died, Cheshire Police other vehicle left the scene after the crash and the force said officers were working to identify the driver. Sgt Andrew Dennison urged anyone who witnessed the incident or who had any information to get in touch. Follow BBC Stoke & Staffordshire on BBC Sounds, Facebook, X and Instagram.
