This is a still from a video in a car yesterday during the match at VPG. A coach reversed from Boothferry Road the full length of Carter Street and into the Victoria Pleasure Grounds. By chance I was on an errand for my cousin and the coach reversed past me. There was nobody guiding it. This is better than last Sunday’s arrangement whereby a coach parked on double yellow lines at a blind corner with a tee junction and the VPG entrance disgorging passengers and luggage into the road, but it’s still not good.
Stu Allerton, in whose car the video was recorded, is an experienced HGV driver and raised concerns about safety in the roads which give access to VPG during the public consultation on the Town Deal projects at the market hall in late 2023, and he has also done so on social media. I have also raised them on petition updates regarding the Town Deal. The public meeting at the market hall was 15 months ago. All concerns about the VPG project, including safety concerns like this, have been dismissed as “being negative”, “moaning”, and “always running Goole down.”
As Stu himself says: “this is exactly the scenario that I brought up at the market hall, what if a young child ran out, or cycled from between the cars while the driver is looking in the other mirror. I am a truck driver and I do know the pitfalls/dangers of large vehicle blindspots. In wide open spaces your peripheral vision would pick it up but not necessarily with only 18 inches either side of the vehicle at best. But what do I know? only been driving trucks for 44 years.”
Stu has also raised concerns about the route for construction vehicle traffic – straight past the entrance to Boothferry Primary School which is also on a 90 degree blind corner - with restricted space and which has issues around congestion and safety at school start and finish times even without construction traffic. I raised the issues with the Health and Safety Executive because I am much more confident writing than Stu. HSE said that it was not their responsibility, and I should take it up with the local authority. Which is East Riding Council. I did, and they, unsurprisingly, dismissed these concerns.
It is very concerning that HSE, the regulator, disclaims responsibility for safety, and refers the matter to the council that is the responsible authority for the VPG project, in charge of planning approval and it seems also regulating safety – in other words marking its own homework. When you look more closely, power is even more concentrated than that. In the autumn of 2023, the East Riding Council chief executive left the council (see for example: (https://www.themj.co.uk/east-riding-chief-executive acting). An acting Chief Executive was appointed, Alan Menzies, who has continued to be Executive Director of Planning and Economic Regeneration. As of now, March 2025 Mr Menzies is still acting Chief Executive. You can see the East Riding register of interests here: (https://www.eastriding.gov.uk/council/councillors-and-members-of-parliament/co-opted-voting-members-register-of-interests/?entry=menzies_alan
Note that the Register gives his group as the East Riding Council Health and Wellbeing Board – which is part of the Humber and North Yorkshire Integrated Care System and has a place on the Integrated Care Board (through the Health and Wellbeing Board’s Chair Jonathan Owen) which makes decisions about hospital closures…
That is a lot of power and influence concentrated in one person. Is that healthy, especially given that East Riding is policing its own homework on aspects of public safety in connection with the VPG project?
Stu raised concerns. I had already started to express concerns by putting leaflets through a selection of homes in Goole over a period of weeks. I had leaflets professionally printed so I could do this in the autumn of 2023 to raise awareness of a petition. I had to do this because the petition was not accepted on the All About Goole Facebook Group, during the period when two Town councillors were administrators for the Facebook group. That looks uncomfortably like suppressing democratic debate.
The petitions were born out of discussions between Stu and I, and conversations we were both having with other local people. I used to write letters to the Goole Times based on conversations I had with people, but the letters page disappeared for a time, which seemed to coincide with the period when the VPG project was going through the planning approval stage, so I stopped doing that.
There are plenty of people who are not very confident writing. I tend to be more comfortable writing than speaking. When I meet people in the street etc. I try to let them choose the subjects to talk about rather than choose subjects myself. Letters in the past, petition updates and some Facebook posts have been, and still are, written based on what people say to me. All my closest loved ones are gone, and my life as I preferred to live it had to stop so I could support my parents, so as things stand I have little left to lose that is worth losing. Other people are not in same position and not comfortable expressing themselves in writing and in public.
A councillor referred to me and my “cohort” as a comment on a previous post.
It’s pretty clear that Goole Town Council and East Riding Council don’t like me, and what they term my “cohort” because we are not sufficiently deferential towards them and those in favour with them, and we are raising issues they don’t want raised. That “cohort” though, in terms of the petition, is over 700 people – more than any of the Goole Town Councillors received in votes that gave them their positions in the last local govt elections. The petition only went on the All About Goole Facebook Group a couple of days ago, it was not accepted when town councillors were administrators.
Sidelining, isolating, harassing, badmouthing - and weaponising the legal system - were all tactics used against those who were not compliant and deferential – enabling the Post Office scandal, the Grenfell Tower Tragedy, the numerous tragedies around sexual abuse in TV and churches. Requiring people to be “deferential” and show respect is at the heart of how all these scandals happened.
We tend to view the above situations as remote. It’s really disheartening to see increasingly worrying symptoms of abuse of power against those[ who have much less power in our own unitary authority and town council.
Despite all protests by local people, East Riding Council has imposed over 50 HMOs on Goole, by far the most of anywhere in East Riding – with none in Beverley. Goole Town Council has done nothing effective to prevent this. Many of those HMOs are in the area around VPG, along with increasing numbers of houses being turned into appartments, and the new flats built directly opposite VPG (further reducing space and reducing visibility around the ground entrance) and that has created a lot of pressure on the roads around VPG for traffic and parking, even when there are no events at VPG.
Residents were already very frustrated, and quite a number angry. All concerns have been dismissed and ignored, and now the issues that were raised but dismissed are proving to be all too real.