Biomech

Not sure, I didn't look that well, but they all have scaffolding on so I'd imagine cladding? Simply because it would be cheaper and less work to use a guy with a ladder and roller extension if they were just painting them. But yeah, they look so much better, so whoever is responsible - well done. (this is were we find out it was a private thing and nothing to do with the council lol)

To be honest, that end of town is an absolute dive. It's like the back end of a shitty London street market. By all means, move your business in, whether it be a tat shop or a charity shop, but for gods sake make it look respectable. Are there not any rules on how these places need to appear? Dirty windows with stock lining the streets and the shop signage is a canvas banner hung over a half removed previous sign. It's absolutely disgusting.

So reports the HT Here I "" local because I don't know how local or who they are - according to the Knorr gravy advert, 70 miles away is "local" :P Anyway, risky business, but well done to them for having the balls to invest in a side of the city that the council has left to squander. Here's hoping they get the work done swiftly and have some nice things back up and running. Personally, I think the resturaunt and bars were fantastic, ideal for the locality and, from an investment and development point of view, a good cheap bet.

I wanted to post this to show that when something is genuinely improved it doesn't go unnoticed. Whoever is responsible for painting up those blocks of flats on the A49 Ross Road (Redhill?), well done, they look really really good and are a massive and marked improvement.

How about a "Personal Responsibility Tax" instead. A tax on people who are unable to look after themselves due to self inflicted reasons? Why is it that everyone feels they need everyone else to look after them and bear the responsibility.

So you're taxing their turnover not their profit? Because that will have an even bigger impact. August 2013, the UK supermarket industry was worth £17 billion. I wouldn't call £170 million that has to paid out by the public as "little impact". To think that it won't affect consumer pricing is just pure ignorance. The reason "tax" is never popular is because tax in the UK is just abuse. Tax keeps going up yet services are coming down. You tax us more and more and we get less and less in return. So if you have this additional social responsibility tax money for the NHS and police services then you won't be cutting policing or health funding then? Of course you will. You'll (as a government representative) will take this extra money and STILL short change us on services. Or is this new tax designed to fill the hole from the lack of petrol tax increases that have now been frozen? Because that's what happened last time, you all dropped tax on one thing to make yourselves look good while simultaneously increasing tax in other areas so the net change was 0. As for the rest of your post, 82% of cigarette costs are tax. Smoking costs the NHS around £5bn a year yet brings in an income of £12bn in tax. Smokers MORE than pay for themselves when it comes to the NHS. Without the tax smokers pay out the NHS would have a gaping £7bn hole to fill.

I'm surprised to see you stand for IOC Jim, while you've now lost my vote, I was expecting to see "Conservative" next to your name. Quelle surprise!

I thought I would give you a the opportunity to expand on here. But that's all bullshit really Jim, sorry but it's true. The reason people go out "pre loaded" with drink from the supermarkets is because of the high cost of drinks in the pubs. The taxes and duties on alcohol in the first place push venue prices up to the extent that people now feel they have to buy in some more affordable drink before they go out. This will do nothing but penalise the wrong people. If my budget is £1.50 a can and you put carling up to £1.70 and carlsberg from £1.30 to £1.50, I'm just going to change my drink. I'm astonished that you sincerly believe that introducing yet ANOTHER tax - on supermarkets is the best way to battle excessive drinking. It doesn't matter at what point the tax is levied, the knock on effect will ultimately push up consumer pricing to cover this loss. I can't honestly believe that you think penalising everyone is a better option than penalising the ones causing the problems. As I mentioned before, why not add a fine to drunk and disorderly charges (in conjunction with an objective means of testing such as a breathaliser)? This is absolutely ludicrous. I don't even go out anymore because of the high prices but now I'm having to pay the price if I want to have a quiet drink with friends at home, a BBQ or a beer with my evening meal. It shows nothing but utter ******* contempt for the public.

Indeed it was our Jim - who clearly doesn't think all of the tax that we pay already is enough... https://twitter.com/Jimofhereford/status/421721879456780288

I agree, but there needs to be a way to objectify it to differentiate between accidents, victims and those actually causing injury through dangerous behaviour. At one point me and my friends ended up in A&E every weekend (it was quite funny), whilst we had a few too drink, we never instigated anything or were injured from alcohol inflicted injuries - ie, we were always in control of our bodily functions. So lets say, those who are charged with drunk and disorderly anyway, are also given a breathaliser and if it reads over 60 they are also charged the "social responsibility tax"

Jim, was that you I heard on the radio earlier trying to push through ANOTHER additional tax on alcohol under the guise of a "Social Responsibility Tax"? Either way, this is ludicrous. It's about time people took PERSONAL responsibility and stopped blaming everyone else and relying on everyone else to take responsibilty for them. This will do NOTHING but penalise those who drink responsibility. What you should be doing is heavily fining those who are drunk and disorderly IN CONJUNCTION with a breathalizer. I think this is very important otherwise it would give the police a free for all for subjective penalisation. Say drunk and disorderly with a breath sample over 60 to enable some degree of objectivity. Again, a Social Responsibility Tax on alcohol is nothing short of fcuking idiotic.

Here we go; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Kingdom_competition_law United Kingdom competition law is affected by both British and European elements. The Competition Act 1998 and the Enterprise Act 2002 are the most important statutes for cases with a purely national dimension prohibiting agreements or practices that restrict free trading and competition between business entities. This includes in particular the repression ofcartels. banning abusive behaviour by a firm dominating a market, or anti-competitive practices that tend to lead to such a dominant position. Practices controlled in this way may include predatory pricing, tying, price gouging, refusal to deal and many others. The Office of Fair Trading (OFT) and the Competition Commission are the two primary regulatory bodies for competition law enforcement. I believe that will get you somewhere Colin.

I know who else would be against a change - the venues. As places like Play serve hot food inside (burgers etc). Allowing hot food vendors to stay open past 1.30am would hit their revenue - and quite hard I imagine. I honestly wouldn't be surprised if there was some kind of arrangement between the nightclubs and the council allowing for a monopoly on hot food. In fact - perhaps this comes under anti monopoly / anti competitive law? Essentially the council are shutting down local traders leaving the nightclubs to monopolise the hot food market. I mean, they could easily raise prices with no objection from local traders as they are in a competitionless environment I seriously think this is an angle to look into Colin.

It seems just as crowded to me around the Lunchbox and there are often people running in front of traffic to the BP. Of course, in the past I was out and "in" the crowds around the chip shops, now I just drive past and see it from a different POV. But there are certainly a lot of people around Franklin House corner from 2-3am and, in my personal experience, there are just as many, if not more, fights. One actually spread across the road from Subway to Franklin house, must have been 15-20 people involved, on the road on the floor, causing traffic to brake sharply and swerve.

Action complete. Between the wankers, the extortionate taxi prices and the lack of a burger. I - like so many others (once packed clubs are now dead inside) - don't bother going out in Hereford anymore.

I don't cycle much but from what I've seen the cycle paths are inconsistent. They seem to be short patches randomly placed that suddenly end. I used to cycle from Credenhill to the city for work and, whilst frequently quicker than the bus!, riding a bike down the likes of Whitecross Road is like playing a game of Operation. The concentration it takes to accurate negotiate drains, cracks, stones and potholes whilst simultaneously being forced into a 12 inch gap between the curb and cars was mentally exhausting. I also used to ride from the city out onto the A49 north, the A49 past the leisure centre was fine. It was in the city where the problems were. There's a mutual twattism between drivers and cyclists that has led to cyclists under taking traffic on the left, which means when you move across the lane to the right hand side to "over" take; A: You can't get between the cars and no one will let a bike in. B: You're now forced to drive into oncoming traffic, C: Drivers don't look in their left mirrors for cyclists let alone the right. Exclusive cycle lanes would negate this issue. When it comes to the city areas, well you can't cycle through most of it (which reminds me, the amount of people who step out onto the road in Church Street because they don't hear a car coming so don't bother to look....), so you have to dismount. If you're on a short trip, there's no point in cycling. Personally, for crossing roads that are difficult, I would always get off my bike, pick it up and throw it on my shoulder and then run across the road, because it was a damn sight quicker/safer. I also agree with this. I think many people are put off cycling as they feel it's too dangerous and difficult to achieve quickly and safely.

Sounds interesting, it would have to be policed with automatic cameras/ticketing if you ask me. It's not as radical as you might think, many streets in Oxford have entire lanes devoted to cyclists. But here's a kicker. The opposition would argue that there isn't enough demand from cyclists. Yet, if I recall correctly, nearly everyone bar myself was FOR developing a Velodrome in recent discussions stating the untapped reservoir of cyclists itching to get out.

On the plus side, now we all know that if the chance arises we can take Hereford Council for a ride and massively inflate our prices :)

I saw that earlier too, was going to mention it here.

It's crazy isn't it. The quality of most of the websites is horrendous and look like they were made by a 5 year old using MS Word. While some of the websites have huge backends and databases to maintain, a suitably cost more to build and administer, there are A LOT of "brochureware" websites such as Hereyoucant which a local company could whip up for 1-3,000. For something like Hereyoucant, I'd probably charge in the region of £1,500-2k then a maintainance subscription - you can bet the London firms charge a subscription service on top of that 20k as well. Either I'm good and efficient or I seriously under value my work :P I have a friend who works for a Scottish web design firm. I was being lazy and asked him how much it would cost to make the site for one of my companies, he quoted £18,000. I hand coded it myself from scratch within 2 weeks.

Just because something is under offer or let doesn't mean that it isn't currently empty or won't be empty for a period of time. I imagine that the River Island building is under some kind of ownership/let but that doesn't negate the fact that it's been a construction site for the last 3 odd years

The restriction on hot food does absolutely nothing to reduce clusters of people standing in the street when you allow cold food shops to stay open. Food is food. Hence the hordes that are always outside The Lunchbox. So when is someone at the council going to admit what the real reason is? You have to be blind, ignorant or have an alternative agenda to fail to see that the crowds still flock to the streets. It's akin to banning magazine fed handguns in america but allowing them to carry revolvers instead.

A number of shops around town have footfall trackers, they log the ins and outs of people through the doors. Useful for checking conversion rates etc. It would be interesting to get hold of the data from various shops and compare customer footfall between 3 years ago and now, between pre and post the previous New Market street disruption and now and after this next lot. And then again maybe 6-12 months after the OLM opens to compare footfall between pre and post OLM. This would give us an independent review of how the road disruptions effect consumerism in Hereford and what kind of impact the OLM has on the town centre.

"Widemarsh Gate" how apt. Personally, I think a bridge would look pretty horrendous. What's wrong with the subway?

So let me get this straight; The council limits and restricts when we can eat The council limits and restricts when we can go to the toilet ....interesting. So when does the blanket curfew start? Making it an offence for us to leave the house after certain hours?