An open letter calling for leaders to recognise vaccine trial participants as having legitimate certification for international travel and other purposes.

I have received residents’ complaints that the pathway at the south end of Seymour Street (section from Shaftesbury Road to Perth Road) is overgrown.

The section north of the car park is council maintained and I raised this with our local environment manager who has asked a supervisor to get the foliage cut back.

I recently raised at the City Council’s Neighbourhood Services Committee the need to upgrade the windows in council housing in a number of parts of the West End, including the Corso/Abbotsford area and Logie.

I asked for an update from housing management on this and have now been advised as follows – from the council’s Head of Housing and Communities :

“The Housing Asset Management Unit team firstly establish when the windows in a development were last replaced. This data is given a 30% weighting in terms of the decision on when they will require to be replaced, with the remaining 70% weighting going on the average cost per house on window repairs over the past 10 years. 

Housing investment works are done on a development, rather than street by street or indeed estate, basis. 

The windows in different developments throughout the City are made of a range of materials, including upvc, timber, aluminium etc. The type of material has an impact on the lifecycle of the windows and, therefore, when we programme their replacement. 

As part of our Windows For All programme, all Council houses were double glazed between 1992 and 2002. Given the volume and relatively short length of this programme, we cannot prioritise purely on lifecycle dates as the impact on the Capital Programme of a repeating 10-year programme would be unsustainable.  

However, given the impact on Covid-19 and the slippage in some programmes, the service is looking into the feasibility of speeding up our window replacement programme.”

I will continue to press for windows upgrades for all council housing in the West End Ward that is in need of this.

There is a new Tenant Grant Fund the City Council is administering to help prevent evictions as a result of COVID-19 related rent arrears between March 2020 and August 2021.

This fund enables local authorities to prevent homelessness and sustain tenancies by assisting tenants with rent arrears problems where a tenant is in either in the social or private rented sectors, and has faced difficulties due to Coronavirus.  

More details are in the poster below :

The southern section of Glamis Road was “surface dressed” some time ago to prolong the life of the road surface.

To be honest I am not a fan of surface dressing (tar and chippings on top of the existing surface) and proposed at the budget this year an increase in the roads capital programme of £2 million this year, which could have been funded and would have increased the amount of “real” quality resurfacing.    Sadly I did not win the vote at the budget but continue to campaign for greater funding for roads and pavements improvements.

Many residents have contacted me in recent months about the surface dressed surface of Glamis Road, south of the roundabout with Blackness Road and Glamis Drive.    

One resident recently described the surface as “dreadful” and I again raised this with the City Council’s Roads Maintenance Partnership.

The partnership’s Senior Engineer has now sent me the following helpful feedback :

“At the tail end of this month, I will be looking over next years carriageway programme.

I will have a look at the section you have highlighted

If it is indeed “dreadful ” then I am sure it will move up the programme.”