Less than two weeks ago, after refusing our freedom of information request, we pointed out that Oldham Council refusing to disclose the cost of theft from Oldham parks after the recent £60,000 theft at Alexandra park was because they had been trying to win a national award for Alexandra Park and secure funding for the Northern roots program based at the park. Well it did not take long for them to prove us right and with no financial sponsors on the books Oldham Council are underwriting the £80,000 cost to create a ‘Northern Roots Oldham’ show garden at the 2020 RHS Hampton Court Palace Garden Festival. This is a council who continue to withhold essential funding for the majority of its parks such as Foxdenton Park which has had repair funding deferred for the last eight years. This blatant spending discrimination continues unabated while the council funnels more cash and grants into Alexandra Park than every other Oldham park combined. This is a council who withdrew £45k funding for the essential dial a ride service because of budget pressure yet they can squander endless public resources into their long list of failed coop schemes. Who do these deluded socialists think will to travel to Oldham to visit an eco/green tourism centre on the edge of Hathershaw which, whether you like us pointing it out or not, has since 2014 rapidly become an unskilled high fertility Roma Gypsy enclave and one of Oldham’s most problematic areas for theft, prostitution, modern slavery, people smuggling, ASB and worklessness? We have been informed today that Oldham Council and the police visited the gypsy site where the stolen equipment from Alexandra Park was traced and despite them seeing one of their ride-on lawnmowers they recovered no equipment and the gypsy’s had the audacity to offer to sell them one of the stolen trailers. In connected news Royton park depot has also been broken into in the last couple of days. New Stihl, rechargeable Hedge cutters. Honda commercial lawn mowers and various other items have been stolen, a few more thousands of pounds worth of machinery gone without trace to add to the the thousands stolen from Alexandra Park and the undisclosed thousands stolen over recent years. Never mind, when the council starts the new Northern Roots, £80,000 show garden and the ECO hub schemes adjacent to Alexandra Park we will see a whole new level of theft.
