Tom Pickup

News & Updates

Posts and updates.

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The LCCA's data observatory is 'a concept'. So we built one over the weekend.

On Friday the combined authority's officers admitted their promised data observatory does not yet exist. By Monday, Cllr Ged Mirfin and I had a working one live: 104,161 Lancashire companies, nine analytical tools, built from public data at no cost to you.

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Four Councils, One Decision: I Modelled What Lancashire's Reorganisation Actually Means

The government has decided: 15 councils become 4 from April 2028. I've built an interactive, fully sourced model of the new councils, their budgets, the need they inherit, what previous reorganisations really cost, and the £28m-to-£585m question nobody else is asking.

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The Asylum System Is Dumping Its Bill on Burnley

I went through every penny Burnley Council spends on temporary accommodation, then the official homelessness figures. A national asylum policy written in Westminster keeps arriving here as a homelessness bill, and in a single year the asylum share of Burnley's homelessness jumped from 1 in 60 to 1 in 9, in a town that can least afford it.

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Where Burnley Council's Money Goes: Every Payment Over £500 in 2025/26

Burnley Borough Council spent £38.06 million in payments of £500 or more last year, across 4,489 separate transactions to 843 suppliers. The council publishes it, but only as four raw spreadsheets nobody can use. So I took every line of the official 2025/26 data and put it in one place you can actually search.

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Nine in Ten Crimes in Lancashire End With No One Charged

Report a crime in Lancashire and the odds anyone is charged are about one in ten. That is actually one of the better records in the country, which tells you how broken the system is everywhere else. Here are the real numbers on whether crime gets answered for.

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Lancashire's Crime Divide: Four Times the Crime in One County

I ranked all fourteen of Lancashire's districts by their crime rate. The result is a four-to-one gap between the top and the bottom, and it lines up almost exactly with deprivation. Lancashire is not a high-crime county on average. It is a divided one.

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Put the Police Back on Burnley's Streets

Violent crime in Burnley runs about a third above the national average, yet the neighbourhood officers who prevent it have been cut by more than half, and we pay more for them every year. After a run of serious knife attacks across East Lancashire, it is time to put visible policing back on our streets.

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What the Councils Own in Burnley: Every Public Title, Mapped

Burnley Borough Council and Lancashire County Council hold more than a thousand property titles in the town, from schools and civic buildings to car parks and slivers of land. I took the public ownership records and put every one I could place on an interactive map. This is the public estate you already own.

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They Want to Work. The System Will Not Let Them.

Most disabled people who are out of work want a job. A wall of government rules, from a frozen savings limit to a year-long support backlog to a shortage of accessible vehicles tied up by the school run, makes sure they cannot get one. The benefits bill is the result, not the cause.

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Sick Sooner, Out of Work, Gone Earlier: The Burnley Trap

Burnley is the 4th most deprived town in England. Its people fall ill younger, are pushed out of work by that illness, and die sooner than almost anywhere in the country. This is not bad luck. It is what decades of managed decline did to a town the country chose to forget.

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PIP Fraud Quadrupled to £410 Million. The Real Leak Is £5.4 Billion.

Fraud in the disability benefit PIP quadrupled in a year. That is bad enough. But the same official figures show 6.8 billion pounds lost to benefit fraud across the board, most of it nowhere near PIP, in a system that writes the cheques and barely checks again.

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Nearly One in Five New Cars in Britain Now Runs on Benefits

The Motability scheme puts almost one in five new cars on Britain's roads, runs on benefit money plus a stack of tax breaks, sits on £3.9 billion of reserves and pays its boss £924,000. Here is what it costs, and how many people in Burnley qualify.

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Where Your Rent Goes in Burnley

Rents in Burnley are rising, most renters now hand the money to a private landlord, and a large slice of it is public money flowing straight from the taxpayer into landlords' pockets. Meanwhile the help with rent is frozen, and the shortfall is dumped on the poorest tenants. Here is where the money actually goes.

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638 Empty Homes, 2,657 Families Waiting

Burnley has hundreds of homes standing empty long-term while thousands of families wait for somewhere to live and people sleep rough. Two numbers that should shame a wealthy country into action. Here they are side by side, and what should be done.

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Ten Thousand People in Burnley Are on PIP. This Is the Bill for Managed Decline.

More than ten thousand people in Burnley claim the disability benefit PIP, the 47th highest of 543 seats in England. It is not because the town is idle. It is the bill for decades of managed decline by an establishment that let the work go and looked away.

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The Shared Houses Burnley Cannot See

The official statistics say Burnley has 65 shared houses. The council's own research says 916, and it had no record of more than half of them. That is how little the people in charge know about the homes being carved up on our streets. Here is the gap, in plain English.

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Who Owns Burnley? Increasingly, Not the People Who Live Here

I went through ten years of public records for my home town. More and more of Burnley is being bought up by landlords, companies and faraway funds, while local families are priced out of owning a home in the place they grew up. Here is what the numbers show, and what I want done about it.

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The Names Behind the Doors: Burnley's Biggest Property Owners

I pulled HM Land Registry's record of every company that owns property in Burnley. The single biggest owner is not a local landlord. It is a faraway fund that owns the ground under more than a thousand Burnley homes and charges the people living in them for the privilege.

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More People, Fewer Homes: The Squeeze Nobody in Burnley Voted For

In ten years Burnley's population grew almost entirely through immigration, home ownership fell, and the cheap housing was bought up to rent out. Whitehall set the numbers, sent the bill, and never asked the town. Here are the figures in full.

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