Who are the 17 candidates in the elections of Members of Parliament for Birkenhead, Wallasey, Wirral South and Wirral West?

Who are the 17 candidates in the elections of Members of Parliament for Birkenhead, Wallasey, Wirral South and Wirral West?

Who are the 17 candidates in the elections of Members of Parliament for Birkenhead, Wallasey, Wirral South and Wirral West?

                                       

Holy Cross primary school Bidston polling station Bidston St James 4th May 2017 resized
Holy Cross primary school Bidston polling station Bidston St James 4th May 2017 resized

I will declare an interest in this piece as my father has proposed one of the candidates.

The deadline for nominations (plus a £500 deposit) ended yesterday at 4 pm and the candidates in the general election to be Members of Parliament for Wirral West, Wirral South, Birkenhead and Wallasey are now known.

They are as follows (by constituency alphabetically, then by surname alphabetically).

BIRKENHEAD

Allan John BRAME (Liberal Democrats)
Jayne Louise Stephanie CLOUGH (Green Party)
Frank FIELD (Labour Party)
Stewart Anthony GARDINER (Conservative Party)

WALLASEY

Debbie CAPLIN (United Kingdom Independence Party)
Paul Philip CHILDS (Liberal Democrats)
Lily CLOUGH (Green Party)
Angela EAGLE (Labour Party)
Andy LIVSEY (Conservative Party)

WIRRAL SOUTH

Chris CARUBIA (Liberal Democrats)
Alison MCGOVERN (Labour Party)
Mandi ROBERTS (Green Party)
Adam Christopher SYKES (Conservative Party)

WIRRAL WEST

Tony CALDEIRA (Conservative Party)
John Bernard Cowan COYNE (Green Party)
Margaret GREENWOOD (Labour Party)
Peter Timothy Clifford REISDORF (Liberal Democrats)

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Do Cllr Christina Muspratt’s election expenses add up (a councillor who is on Wirral Council’s Audit and Risk Management Committee overseeing £billions of public money)?

Do Cllr Christina Muspratt’s election expenses add up (a councillor who is on Wirral Council’s Audit and Risk Management Committee overseeing £billions of public money)?

Do Cllr Christina Muspratt’s election expenses add up (a councillor who is on Wirral Council’s Audit and Risk Management Committee overseeing £billions of public money)?

                      

I’ve decided to publish the election expenses by ward alphabetically. However these are only for candidates who got over a quarter of the vote.

There was a small delay in inspecting these returns due to the pressures on the election side at Wirral Council due to the EU Referendum.


The first one is for Bebington ward and that of Christina Muspratt (the Labour candidate) who was elected as a councillor.

Cllr Christina Muspratt sits on Wirral Council’s Audit and Risk Management Committee overseeing hundreds of millions of pounds of public expenditure and also (as Wirral Council is the Administering Authority) the multi-billion pound Merseyside Pension Fund Wirral Council runs (although the Pensions Committee also have oversight of the Merseyside Pension Fund)).

However her donations and spending don’t match in the pages below.

Her campaign lists £243.06 of spending (although some notional spending should’ve also been declared but mysteriously wasn’t as the printing of leaflets at Alison McGovern‘s office (the Labour MP for Wirral South) was done at below commercial rates)).

Indeed the use of taxpayer-funded resources at Wirral Council and at Alison McGovern’s office (the Labour MP for Wirral South) is odd as generally there is a bar on taxpayer-funded elements to party political activity during elections and indeed if people would like to leave comments explaining this it would be welcome.

As a general rule having the taxpayer fund elements of an election campaign (a party political matter) is seen as wrong.

There are however only £150 in donations to cover this spending though. I hope Labour aren’t applying this kind of voodoo economics to Wirral Council too!

The declarations signed by herself and her agent are also included. As she was well under the spending limit (even if you include what the notional expenditure should’ve been) of £1,456.16 it’s unlikely anything that this will result other than mild embarrassment as in future (hopefully) she will read things before signing them!

I’ve included the originals as a zipped file below, thumbnails of the return (which as a lot of it’s handwritten may be hard to read) are below that.

I’ve linked each thumbnail to a higher resolution image which should show if you click on the thumbnail.

Compressed file of all 20 original pages in election expenses return for Christina Muspratt (thumbnails below)

Bebington May 2016 Wirral Council councillor candidate Christina Muspratt agent declaration Page 1 of 1
Bebington May 2016 Wirral Council councillor candidate Christina Muspratt agent declaration Page 1 of 1

Continue reading “Do Cllr Christina Muspratt’s election expenses add up (a councillor who is on Wirral Council’s Audit and Risk Management Committee overseeing £billions of public money)?”

Election: Wallasey (Labour hold), Birkenhead (Labour hold), Wirral South (Labour hold), Wirral West (Labour gain)

Election: Wallasey (Labour hold), Birkenhead (Labour hold), Wirral South (Labour hold), Wirral West (Labour gain)

Election: Wallasey (Labour hold), Birkenhead (Labour hold), Wirral South (Labour hold), Wirral West (Labour gain)

                                            

In the General Election for 2015 on Wirral the results are as follows.

Wallasey Constituency (declared at 3.41) LABOUR HOLD Electorate 65,495 Turnout 66.5%

Candidate Party Votes cast
Angela Eagle Labour Party 26,176
Chris Clarkson Conservative Party 9,828
Geoffrey Robert Caton United Kingdom Independence Party 5,063
Julian Charles Pratt Green Party 1,288
Kris Brown Liberal Democrat 1,011
     

Birkenhead Constituency (declared at 3.49) LABOUR HOLD Electorate 62,410 Turnout 62.9%

Candidate Party Votes cast
Frank Field Labour Party 26,468
Clark Edward Vasey Conservative Party 5,816
Wayne Anthony Harling United Kingdom Independence Party 3,838
Kenny Peers Green Party 1,626
Allan Brame Liberal Democrat 1,396
     

Wirral South Constituency (declared at 3.57) LABOUR HOLD Electorate 56,956 Turnout 73.7%

Candidate Party Votes cast
Alison McGovern Labour Party 20,165
John Bell Conservative Party 15,566
David Anthony Scott United Kingdom Independence Party 3,737
Elizabeth Jewkes Liberal Democrat 1,474
Paul Thomas Cartlidge Green Party 895
     

Wirral West Constituency (declared at 4.58) LABOUR GAIN Electorate 55,377 Turnout 75.9%

Candidate Party Votes cast
Margaret Greenwood Labour Party 18,898
Esther McVey Conservative Party 18,481
Hilary Jane Jones United Kingdom Independence Party 2,772
Peter Timothy Clifford Reisdorf Liberal Democrat 1,433
David James 274
     

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UPDATED: EXCLUSIVE: 90 Incredible Lyndale School Closure Consultation Responses

EXCLUSIVE: 90 Incredible Lyndale School Closure Consultation Responses

EXCLUSIVE: 90 Incredible Lyndale School Closure Consultation Responses

                             

Phil Ward (Wirral Council's SEN Lead) at a later meeting of Wirral Schools Forum 2nd July 2014 (who chaired the consultation meeting at Acre Lane on the 16th June)

Phil Ward (Wirral Council’s SEN Lead) at a later meeting of Wirral Schools Forum 2nd July 2014 (who chaired the consultation meeting at Acre Lane on the 16th June and is referred to in some of the responses)

It’s not often there’s a “stop the presses” moment here or as this is an online publication “stop the electrons” moment. Yesterday I had planned to write about the Hoylake RNLI Open Day today.

Many moons ago (on the 29th June 2014) I made a Freedom of Information Act request for the consultation responses to the consultation about closing Lyndale School. Rather predictably the answer from Wirral Council on 29th July was “no”, we’re going to publish these in the future.

On July 14th, this blog published the Lyndale parents’ response to the consultation, on 30th July a response from some parents of a child at Stanley School and on August 12th Cllr Phil Gilchrist’s response.

The Green Party also published their response on their website.

However this was just four responses out of ninety that were known about. I was always curious about what the other eighty-six were! The following documents should show this. Sadly Wirral Council has taken it upon itself to black out a lot of the detail such as who the responses are from, however the other details can allow you to guess at who some of the names are. Apologies over some parts being hard to read, I think as part of the redaction some quality has been lost and a few are handwritten responses. I’ll try my best to type up some of the harder to read sections.

Wirral Council will be publishing these responses as part of the Cabinet papers by Thursday. UPDATE: Wirral Council will now not be publishing the consultation responses as part of the Cabinet papers. Apologies for this, in previous consultations they had published the consultation responses with the papers for those making the decision and Wirral Council had stated they would publish the responses but seemingly either changed their mind or lied. The responses are split by which category they came from into ten files and provide an interesting insight as to what was going on behind the scenes both during the consultation and as far back as the call in meeting. The way the consultation meetings were conducted comes in for criticism, so does the claim in the consultation documents that staff would be redeployed.

Elleray others (4 pages)

Elleray parents (6 pages)

Lyndale governors (16 pages)

Lyndale others (36 pages)

Lyndale parents (100 pages)

Lyndale staff (22 pages)

Other governors (4 pages)

Others (96 pages)

Stanley others (10 pages)

Stanley parents (10 pages)

UPDATE The text of the handwritten responses (some of which can be hard to read) and one typed response which has poor contrast with the background making it hard to read can be read here.

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Lyndale School Consultation Meeting: Julia Hassall “we’re not having straightforward consultation” (part 10)

Lyndale School Consultation Meeting: Julia Hassall “we’re not having straightforward consultation” (part 10)

Lyndale School Consultation Meeting: Julia Hassall “we’re not having straightforward consultation” (part 10)

                                                 

Phil Ward (Wirral Council's SEN Lead) at a later meeting of Wirral Schools Forum 2nd July 2014 (who chaired the consultation meeting at Acre Lane on the 16th June)
Phil Ward (Wirral Council’s SEN Lead) at a later meeting of Wirral Schools Forum 2nd July 2014 (who chaired the consultation meeting at Acre Lane on the 16th June)

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Lyndale School Closure Consultation Meeting 16th June 2014 (Audio only)

Continues from Lyndale School Consultation Meeting: Cllr Dave Mitchell “They need the care they’ve got!” (part 9).

This transcript below starts at 1:05:50 in the video above.

DAVID ARMSTRONG (ASSISTANT CHIEF EXECUTIVE)
Just before we get to it, just before we get to it, I’ll just make the point about you’ll know there a number of people sitting here who will know we’re having discussions about Elleray Park and Stanley …(unclear)… and more recently we’ve been having discussions about Foxfield based on comments that have been made towards us.

Subsequently and clearly I’ve got to talk about the nature around the Wallasey School, but what was referred to was Wallasey School is currently based at an outpost base where inevitably …(unclear)… similar …(unclear)… some space …(unclear)… and I think that’s a very short-term arrangement, so it’s nothing at all to do with the Lyndale School.

TOM HARNEY (CHAIR OF GOVERNORS)
Well thanks for that point about a shared site.

JULIA HASSALL (DIRECTOR OF CHILDRENS’ SERVICES)
Can I just come back to the point the gentleman made at the back you know? I’ll come back in a minute on what Alison McGovern said. You’ve said why haven’t we got parents at the front telling?

GENTLEMAN AT BACK
I said there’s, I don’t want to object, but whether it was legal.

JULIA HASSALL (DIRECTOR OF CHILDRENS’ SERVICES)
and I had a meeting with the Chief Executive of the Council, Graham Burgess. There were three parent governors, two of whom are here tonight and they said to Graham Burgess and myself, it feels like we’re not having straightforward consultation about some of these issues. We don’t know err what you’re doing to investigate the other eight options along with the other proposals that have come forward and what we have done and what Alison McGovern also said was I think, was is there something about, can you recreate Lyndale ethos in a different setting? Can you explore that and so we’ve had one meeting so far, we’ve got another meeting on Friday, to try and have a different kind of conversation about how we explore all the different options because I think the gentleman here raised the point when we were at the Floral Pavilion, it feels like when we have these meetings sometimes you can, questions from the floor, we know we kind of almost it feels like defend the position, whereas you can with smaller groups sometimes saying you can have a different kind of conversation but we’re doing that in tandem with these meetings to try and flush out all the different options and look at them in real detail.

GENTLEMAN FROM AUDIENCE
OK, well can I just say that the replication of Lyndale and that’s what I want to talk about. Lyndale even though we knew at the beginning of the year and it’s fully documented, it says many of the children have had PMLD [profound and multiple learning disabilities], it’s the actual, it’s the vast majority, it’s almost all the children.

JULIA HASSALL (DIRECTOR OF CHILDRENS’ SERVICES)
It is.

GENTLEMAN FROM AUDIENCE
So, the reason why Lyndale is so effective in that area is because it’s a small, lovely school and it does feel like, it does feel like a home and people say …(unclear)… 0.1%, it’s the very most vulnerable of our children. So they are all, this facility actually caters for them because they are vulnerable, they are vulnerable to other more boisterous children in care.

They need more responsible adult care, they are in the absolute …(unclear)… in this Borough and the reason why I’ve gone round approaching all those businesses, is because one hundred percent of the people think that that 0.1% of our most vulnerable children should be the …(unclear)… number one priority on everybody’s agenda and everything else should come second to this.

He received a round of applause for what he had said.

1:09:00

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