Todmorden: Reader's response to Todmorden's £17.5m Improvement Plan

Todmorden cash injection - will not be 'levelling up', not even 'catching up'
Todmorden to receive much needed cashTodmorden to receive much needed cash
Todmorden to receive much needed cash

Joyce Catterick writes

Along with other selected towns, Todmorden is to have money for a Town

Improvement Plan, £17.5 m, a large sum, though less than the £25 m Craig

Whittaker MP promised us before the 2019 election.

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Mr Whittaker says this will be ‘levelling up’ Todmorden. No, Mr Whittaker, it will not.

This money, however well distributed, will not make up for 11 years of cuts to local

authority budgets; it will not make up for the failure to improve our railway; it will not

make up for the reductions in help for the elderly and disabled; it will not make up for

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the limited investment in well paid jobs with proper career structures which are

abundantly available in the south east; I am sure others can add to my list of how

successive Conservative governments, over the past decade, have at best not cared

about the North, only occasionally handing out sums of money for desperately

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needed improvements such as the new building at Todmorden High School.

Apparently, the Town Deal Board still has a lot more work to do, Business Cases to

be drawn up, criteria to be met by Project Leaders – I wish them well, but while we

still have a largely low wage economy, with rising travel costs, heating prices rising,

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food at least 5% up, national insurance stamps going up, Todmorden, and many,

many other northern towns will not be ‘levelling up’, not even ‘catching up’.

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