Words by Councillor Robert Alden
Cllr Gareth Moore and I continue to raise residents’ ongoing issues with the Council’s fortnightly bin collection and food waste pilot.
We continue to demand the City Council scrap their fortnightly collections and reinstate weekly bin collections.
This month we met with Shadow Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government, Katie Lam MP, to discuss issues in Birmingham including the scourge of badly run exempt accommodation.
We explained our campaign calling on the Government to change the law to make exempt accommodation need planning permission so that it can finally be controlled, its growth stopped and local family housing saved.
We also visited Botham House on Orphanage Road to see the completed building project. When the developers looked to sell the block there was a risk an exempt accommodation provider was going to buy it and convert it to exempt accommodation.
Thankfully we have managed to stop that and, working with Birmingham City Council, the block is now going to remain as older person accommodation, as originally intended. The Council is using it to allow older residents to downsize and so free up larger family homes for use by families.
Botham Place is named after the prominent 19th-century Birmingham architect J.R. Botham, who designed the historic Sir Josiah Mason’s Orphanage.
We’ve also chased the Council housing department about the cleanliness of tower blocks in Erdington and the need for the CCTV to be reinstated to keep residents safe.
For more from Erdington’s Councillor Robert Alden and Councillor Gareth Moore visit www.facebook.com/ErdingtonNews
This article was first published in the Erdington Local monthly newspaper on 16 October.
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