Have your say on the future of transport in Headingley

In May this year, the Transport Secretary ruled that the Leeds NGT trolleybus scheme was ‘not suitable for development’. However, the government agreed that the city of Leeds could still have the £173m public funding which it would have contributed to the trolleybus to spend on alternative transport schemes. The city council is therefore now consulting residents on how they think this money could best be used.

We think it is particularly important for Headingley residents to have their say in this consultation. Previous transport plans such as the trolleybus have proposed major changes to our area, and Headingley residents have needed to play a huge and important role in pointing out their flaws. We should all take this opportunity to feed our views into the development of new schemes from the start, and ensure that they reflect Headingley’s priorities.

The survey is available to take here until 20th September. It does not take long to complete, as it consists mainly of multiple-choice questions with tick-box answers. However, there are also two free text boxes towards the end of the survey, where you can entered more detailed thoughts and ideas of your own.

Thank you!

Headingley Liberal Democrats would like to thank everyone who voted for Penny Goodman in the local election on Thursday, and the fantastic campaign team who supported her.

Sadly, Penny was not elected, but her vote share went up by 6 percentage points, from 12.4% in 2015 to 18.7% this time – a real testament to all her hard work over the last year.

The full details are in the table below, for local politics geeks!

Results spreadsheet

Beyond Headingley, the overall Liberal Democrat vote share across Leeds also went up, and the Liberal Democrats have proven the biggest winners in the local council elections across England. These are the overall results currently showing on the BBC’s local election coverage page, with 122 of 124 council election counts now completed.

BBC overall results

We will be back out on the streets of Headingley again soon, listening to local views and working for the community. But for this weekend, we think we have earnt a pint!

Veritas after the count smaller

Headingley’s unrecycled glass

It’s clear that the people of Headingley really want household glass collection. We can tell by how often we see sights like this when we are walking round the ward.

Uncollected glass

Maybe some of these boxes eventually make it to bottle banks – but for the many Headingley households which don’t have a car, that isn’t an easy option.

Elsewhere in the UK, 89% of councils now offer household glass recycling collections, including every major city. But Leeds remains behind the curve in not offering this vital service.

This is bad news for all of us. The proportion of waste recycled in Leeds has actually been falling recently, from 43.7% in 2013-14 to 42.9% in 2014-15 (the most recent figures). Councils at the top of the national league table are managing recycling rates of over 60%, so there is huge room for improvement in Leeds – and household glass collections would be an obvious way to get the rate up.

Until that happens, Leeds city council will continue paying to put unrecycled waste into landfill sites instead, costing money in local council tax. And all of us will pay the price as our environment degrades – both through the excess waste and through the traffic emissions caused by hundreds of individual journeys to bottle banks.

Headingley Christmas bin collections

Headingley residents might like to know about the special arrangements for bin collections in Leeds over Christmas and the New Year. This year, the council will not be sending out letters to notify residents of the changes, so please use the ‘share’ buttons at the bottom of this post to help make sure that your friends and neighbours are aware.

Christmas bin collection dates for Headingley Leeds 2015Remember that you can check your bin collection dates at any time of year by entering your postcode here. You can also print out a personal bin collection calendar.

Focus stories: Labour’s bin shame

Local Liberal Democrat campaigner, Penny Goodman, is calling on Leeds Labour to sort out the bins in Headingley after receiving complaints from residents in the Ash Road area that the new opt-in recycling scheme, brought in by the Labour Councillors, is not working.

Green bin collections were stopped and residents who wished to sort their recycling were told that they could request recycling bags. But on Chapel Street the old green bins have been left abandoned, blocking the pavement and causing problems for people with disabilities and parents with pushchairs. Some residents have also not received recycling bags despite requesting them several times.

Bins blocking the pavement in Chapel Street

Bins blocking the pavement in Chapel Street

Labour-run Leeds City Council is letting Headingley down by not ensuring that the new scheme is implemented properly across the whole of the pilot area.

Local residents have also been telling us that they would like to see doorstep glass and food waste recycling in their area. Liberal Democrat Councillors in other parts of the City implemented a successful doorstep food waste recycling pilot, which we want to see rolled out across Leeds.

Update: after publishing this story in our Focus leaflet, we reported the bin problems in Chapel Street to the Environment and Housing team, and were told that this street is not part of the Ash Road opt-in recycling pilot after all. Yet the local residents we spoke to believed that they were included in the pilot, and the suspension of their regular green bin collections suggests their bin collection teams thought so too. So the real problem here is poor communication around the pilot scheme, leading to residents and collection teams believing one thing and Environment and Housing believing another.

October Focus

We’re starting to deliver our October Focus leaflet today. Watch out for yours!

October Focus

Note: we aim to deliver a leaflet to every household in Headingley, but of course some addresses are inaccessible (e.g. flats with entry codes), and sometimes we just run out! That’s why we put our stories online as well. You can browse through them by following our ‘focus stories’ category.

Ash Terrace success

A couple of weeks ago, a resident got in touch to let us know about some unwanted weeds and trees which had grown up in the end of Ash Terrace. Penny Goodman went along to have a look, and then contacted the council to discuss what could be done about it.

The good news is that the council’s street teams responded quickly, and today the growth was all cleared away. Two whole truck-loads of greenery were removed.

The resident who originally raised the issue kindly gave us permission to share his pictures of the newly-cleared street. So Ash Terrace has gone from this:

Ash Terrace 2 To this:

ash terrace 3

What a change! We are really pleased to have helped get this sorted out, and are looking forward to supporting local residents in developing the community garden which they would like to establish here now that the weeds are gone.

Headingley Taps success

Two weeks ago, residents on Wood Land and Alma Road told us that there was a lot of mess and rubbish around the recycling bins outside the Headingley Taps pub. We raised this with the council, and today they reported back that the mess has been cleaned, and measures put in place to ensure that regular cleaning now happens whenever the bins are emptied. Great news!

On the same evening, residents also raised concerns about the entrance to the Lupton student residences, where students often leave litter on the pavement while waiting for taxis, because there is no proper bin to put it in. We’re pleased to report that the management of the halls have now agreed to install a new bin at this location. The bin itself is yet to appear, though. We will be checking back regularly until it does!

Is the trolleybus scheme delaying safety improvements?

Recently we raised two sets of road safety concerns with the council’s Highways & Transportation department: bicycle accidents on Headingley Lane and cars going the wrong way along the one-way stretch of Alma Road.

Council officials have now responded on both issues, and have agreed that the concerns are real. The stretch of Headingley Lane between Hyde Park corner and Bainbrigge Road has seen 40 accidents in the past five years – a rate which is 276% the national average for a road of this kind. Meanwhile, traffic surveys on Alma Road in 2009 and 2012 recorded an average of 28 vehicles every day travelling in the wrong direction on the one-way stretch closest to the A660.

These are serious issues, then.

However, we noticed a common theme in the council officials’ responses. They stated that both roads are due to be affected by the NGT trolleybus route if the project is implemented, changing them substantially and improving their safety.

But a decision is yet to be made about the trolleybus. The results of a six-month-long public enquiry are not expected until later this year, or even early in 2016. And of course the eventual result may be that the scheme is abandoned.

It sounds to us as though the uncertainty around the trolleybus scheme is delaying measures which are needed now to improve street safety in Headingley. The local community is already strongly opposed to the trolleybus, and certainly shouldn’t have to wait until it is installed for Headingley’s streets to be made safer.