Earlier this week was the regular meeting of Bury’s Full Council and as ever your local Councillors were busy asking questions of the Council Leadership on issues from bins, traffic flow or the Prestwich Memorial Wall.

Prestwich Memorial Wall
Councillor Michael Powell asked about the Prestwich Memorial Wall, which lists honours by name the local people who gave their lives in both world wars. Because of the (now permanent) closure of the Longfield Suite the wall is not available for public viewing which we believe is wrong.

Question:
Can the leader guarantee that a Prestwich home will be found for the memorial wall, following the permanent closure of the Longfield Suite?
Answer:
The Prestwich Village regeneration programme will deliver a new multi-use hub building that will include civic events spaces. This is a perfect permanent location for the memorial wall. As part of the next stages of consultation about the wider development we would also love to hear other ideas from the wider community.

Councillor Powell asked a follow on question of whether a temporary location could be found for the wall could be found to give the people who gave their lives the full respect they deserve.

Traffic Flow Bury New Road
Question
Can leader inform us what monitoring of the traffic flow on the roads in Prestwich around Bury new Rd has taken place in the last two years?
Answer

Bury New Road has an automatic traffic counter in situ which is owned and operated by Transport for Greater Manchester to which the Council can view vehicle numbers and speed information. There are also Bluetooth sensors which allow journey time information to be gathered. However, the pandemic has impacted on highway use and the last year and a half is obviously not representative of “pre-covid” use.

This data shows that over the last two years for Prestwich Village, although journey times have increased slightly from the beginning of this year for northbound traffic, they are still lower than those at the end of 2019 and significantlylowerthanthoseof2017. Southboundtraffic journey times have now risen to 2019 levels but are still slightly lower than 2017 levels.

Details are set out below between the journey time measuring points on the A56 between Valley Park Road (junction at Tesco/TGI Friday’s) and Hilton Lane. Please be aware that these are averages and that the actual journeytimesvarythroughoutthedayandyear. Road works can also have a temporary impact on journey times.

Vehicle numbers remained consistent between 2017 & 2019 at around 26,500 per day with 2020 recording an average of 22,600 vehicles per day and 2021 so far indicating 23,900 vehicles per day.

Bins
We also asked about the massive problems people have been having recently with missed bin collections, since the introduction of new bin collection ’rounds’ and new bin lorries.

We asked how many bin collections had been missed since the changes, and how much money had been spent on Agency staff to clear the missed bins.

The Cabinet Member didn’t have the figures to hand, but we have been promised them in writing (and will share when we get them).

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