In his fourth blog, Councillor Coleshill slams overbuilding in the Langside ward.

**It has been a funny old week in lake Langside. There has been the great wind and rain and the heartache the house and road damage has caused (my roof still leaks). **

There has also been a certain churn in the inner workings of the council. There is no doubting that this is election year and great change is on the cards. That is one of the reasons so many empty initiatives will be (are being) pushed into the public gaze.

Consider: £100 million for housing or business "announced" from the pension fund with no proper authority that I can see to make it happen. Who does not want to see investment in housing (given the cuts made by the Scottish Government?) Will this do it? Not likely; A city "economy for growth plan" working on a report produced by hand picked contributors.

They are not daft people and it is not a daft plan but why now and does anyone think it will soon provide more than a sound bite for the administration?

Langside continues to be overbuilt. Despite me putting a green space protection clause in city plan 2 (when I first got elected the plan had been mostly finished by that point but I managed to get it amended) the Scottish Government reporter has overruled our operating that clause in Langside (the second most densly packed ward in the city) on at least one occasion.

Well, expect lots of political paper and targeted phone calls over the next four months (I will be pushing some of it through your doors) try not to set the dogs on any of us!

In his third blog for STV Glasgow, Councillor Coleshill calls for more pressure to be applied to the Scottish Government on the issue of homelessness.

Well it’s the “Christmanay” time of year, which means that with Christmas and Hogmanay holidays it is difficult to do anything not connected with eating, drinking, present buying, or family visiting.

Rain, dustbins and roads problems are what my constituents have been contacting me about. So no change there, these are perennial winter problems.

There will be no official council sponsored hogmanay celebrations on George Square this year – which is a pity I think (no one consulted the majority of councillors about that just the leader and the chief executive made the decision) but at least that has meant the fun fair and the ice rink are bigger and more permanent.

To end homelessness in Scotland by the end of 2012 (an SNP pledge) local authorities need to be able to provide people with council and housing association homes, as well as to develop strategies to prevent homelessness.

However the Scottish Government is cutting the budget for affordable housing and Infrastructure Secretary Alex Neil is backtracking on a pledge to build thousands of socially rented properties each year.

Interestingly Glasgow was the largest council not to supply figures for homelessness in response to a freedom of information request from the Liberal Democrat MSPs. Don’t the people running the city realise putting pressure on Holyrood is vital?

The council didn’t respond to consultation from the Scottish Government on prison visiting changes either.

Once upon a time – when ministers consulted and not one response was in favour of their proposals they would think again. The proposal to do away with independent prison visitors is to go ahead anyway.

At the moment these are a sort of inspectorate who were charged with looking at general conditions to make them comply with minimum decent standards but they can also take up individual complaints. The proposal is to have Government appointed agents who may be “advocates” for individual prisoners but will not look at the system as a whole to see if it is humane, and will be expected to make the prisoners accept their lot.

This will place Scotland in a position that not one European country is in, alongside North Korea and Iran.

There is some excuse for the council not putting in a response – they were only given a couple of days to do it and the consultation was supposed to be about suggestions for improving the existing system, not whether to abolish it – no clue as to this intention appeared in the government paperwork.

In the new year (after the May elections) the council will look very different. Nearly half the existing Labour councillors are standing down for one reason or another. Not being chosen by their party in the ward they currently represent, finally giving up their second salary after a year (in the case of the MSPs) or honourably retiring, play their part. In the main however this huge turnover is due to many being de-selected i.e. found not suitable to stand for the Labour party in any ward.

Taken with the inevitable changes occurring in the other parties (two of my Lib Dem colleagues are retiring after being on the council for many years) the council will have a lot of different individuals whichever way the electorate decide to vote next year.

I want to wish everyone the best of luck in 2012. As my Dad says, "Hope for the best, expect the worst and take what comes."

In the first edition of his blog, Councillor Coleshill discusses regeneration, grit bins and PFI.

It’s been a busy week - with a mixture of the large, the small, the broken and the windblown.

Some local news is that Shawlands town centre action plan is trembling on the brink of being produced. After a mere four and a half years of pushing - by me, community councils and other local activists, the council is consulting on a broad framework that is the precursor to an action plan.

As the document points out, a core problem (identified after four and a half years of research) is the arcade. It boasts a tired 1960s design which cuts a depressing swath through the main shopping area. An anchor tenant for the centre would be a help.

What a pity then that a few weeks ago, Wholefoods (the up market US food retailer) decided to locate its first shop outside London a mile down the road from the arcade just outside the Glasgow border. Glasgow regeneration planning seems to be about the city centre and perhaps out of town developments, not much heed is given to the needs of local areas like Shawlands or Mount Florida.

Nonetheless - please put in your comments on the consultative document to the council.

Monday:

The new Kings Park community council is now meeting every month separately from Croftfoot community council for the first time. The problems aired at the first two meetings included the lack of play areas or clubs for children in the Kings Park area, shops selling drink to underage kids, and the perennial problem of parent parking in front of Kings Park primary school.

Responsible parents are fed up with the attitude: “Oh, it’s OK for me to park in a narrow lane on double yellow lines, at a corner and on a hill when I drop my kids, into the path of oncoming traffic officer, because I will only be here for a minute.”

Tuesday:

I completed putting round a ward letter asking about the number and location of grit bins and got quite a lot of helpful feedback (thank you). It will help me to get the LES (Land and Environmental Services) people to act, we should get some more.

Also on Tuesday I was told that - as people suggested at a series of consultations - the Park and Ride facility at Hangingshaw Place will now mainly be using the old council depot. This leaves a good deal more of the green and reduces the car park next to the bus interchange.

A couple of weeks ago on Wednesday evening I had a surgery at Mount Florida school but for once nobody came and I was relieved - on my way to the school I broke my glasses so couldn’t read anything, so spent the whole time in the school trying (with the help of the very nice janitor) to fix them – no luck.

Last Thursday:

Every second Thursday there is an Executive Committee meeting of the council, every six weeks the full council meets in the afternoon as well. Last Thursday (I was there with a spare pair of reading glasses) the executive discussed a deal to treat domestic waste so that we did not have to use landfill which is expensive and environmentally dangerous.

The scheme is to pay a company to treat the waste for recycling, bio digesting, and using the gas to generate electricity and heat. A private company will design build and maintain the facility and borrow the money needed to build it. Getting a private company to borrow when we as a council could borrow cheaper is a mad way to run public investment. PFI is daft in this way and it pretends that we are not even borrowing.

On balance it’s the best deal we could get which would take Glasgow from the worst to the best council in Scotland in terms of landfill. I voted for it with the proviso that (if possible) Glasgow would put some capital in when possible and reduce the PFI element.

Given the bad wind storm on that day the schools were closed and the full council meeting was curtailed – no great loss perhaps except the traditional Christmas drink with the Lord Provost was cancelled!

I went to a local business in my ward in Shawlands to get a pair of reading glasses. I meant to go for the cheap frames (even though they probably do make me look like a harassed dad from the 1970s) and I don’t often let a sense of style or fashion overcome my innate meanness - but the nice man in the shop gently talked me up from bad taste but cheap to acceptable and not expensive.

I suppose I need to be publicly presentable, since this Friday I’m off to Edinburgh to talk with other local government people about the money the Scottish Government are going to move out of Glasgow when they centralise the police and fire.

Have a great Christmas!