Opinion: Saddened by the sight of our once welcoming and thriving city centre

Sad for the residents, visitors and businesses struggling to provide decent services, and sad about our once welcoming and thriving centre. Cardboard box homes in shop doorways, beggars, graffiti, rough sleepers, emptyshops with broken windows and discarded drug-taking paraphernalia on the Town Hall steps.

Some may suggest that large signs stating ‘The taxpaying residents of Peterborough are no longer welcome here’ should be put up in Bridge Street and Long Causeway, Westgate and Broadway – because that’s what it feels like.

The current Conservative administration has been in power for decades and overseen this pervasive decline, watching as the flame of our city centre has burned out.

The current Leader regularly boasts from his grand Town Hall offices about how he and his many cabinet members and ‘advisors’ are rescuing us from the financial mess their own years of mismanagement have got us into.

But many of you will also remember just a few years ago this administration gave a green light to the multi-million pound Empower solar-panel loan, which collapsed after they defaulted on repayments. Peterborough’s ruling Party also hit the local and national headlines as architects of the massive speculative solar park on prime farmland east of our city, which the MP at the time declared was misguided and had ‘financial projections based on guesswork’ with a ‘flawed procurement process’. The scheme was eventually scrapped at a reported cost to taxpayers in the region of £3million.

The much-heralded city-centre TK Maxx/New Look building community hub project has collapsed, the planned museum improvements and extension have disappeared and the plug’s just been pulled on the electric bus depot plans but that’s all ok because the council has loaned £15m to a private company to build a hotel – the repayment of which by the way has already been delayed twice!

So, dear reader, the Conservatives’ claim to be financially astute and sensible with your money is false. Look beyond the propaganda and political stunts. Look through the smoke and mirrors rhetoric and look forward to a desperately needed change.

Peterborough First is that refreshing change - with back-to-basics ideas costed to improve where we live, to return to a safer city, a cleaner city with a family-friendly centre you want to come back to and enjoy.

Urban and rural policies to counter the current ‘growth at any cost’ mantra we now suffer, to help us grow sympathetically and attract business development providing new jobs and opportunities for anyone, not just cosy political allies.

Peterborough First is independent of mainstream political dogma and herd mentality, a serious group of very experienced councillors. Our reason for being is for people like you, not perpetrating slavish party-political allegiance at whatever cost to our taxpayers.

We have a toxic political legacy to remove, trust to create and a cross-party collaboration to generate to get the right councillors with the right experience in the right jobs to make it happen.