'Super council' leader vows to fight for East Lancashire (From Lancashire Telegraph)

'Super council' leader vows to fight for East Lancashire

6:20pm Thursday 26th November 2009

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EAST Lancashire’s new “super council” met for the first time yesterday - and vowed to put aside local rivalries and fight for the area.

The proposed racecourse near Simonstone was on the agenda, and a business leader said thousands of “traditional” jobs were being lost in the area each year.

Under the banner of Pennine Lancashire, Blackburn with Darwen, Burnley, Pendle, Hyndburn, Rossendale and Ribble Valley councils have agreed to join forces in an attempt to rival regional heavyweights Liverpool and Manchester.

Today was the first time the new committee, which will oversee a limited company by the same name, had met, almost a year after Prime Minister Gordon Brown signed his approval to the scheme.

The committee, made up of leaders and chief executives of the councils, was told the team behind the racecourse were finally close to securing funding for the all-weather track, with plans set to be unveiled early next year.

Simonstone resident John Hill said: “Residents of Read and Simonstone and surrounding areas deserve to be finally told whether there is a real and genuine prospect of a planning application being made, given the uncertainty and non-statutory blight that residents continue to suffer”.

Blackburn with Darwen council leader Mike Lee, who chaired the meeting, said: “We are convinced that the approach is a genuine one.”

Mike Damms, chief executive of East Lancashire Chamber of Commerce told the councillors: “We are losing approximately 2,500 jobs a year in traditional sectors.

“So just to stand still we need to replace 2,500 jobs a year.”

Plans to attract jobs to key business sites at Burnley Bridge and Whitebirk were also debated, and it was revealed only 30 of a promised 700 jobs created by government funding had materialised so far.

But bosses insisted the full amount of funding was in ;lace to hit the 700 target by March 2011.

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