Wealden District Leaders Update

I am pleased to report that, according to latest performance and financial reports, the Alliance continues to run the council in a prudent, responsible manner so that it provides good quality, value for money services, and many thanks to officers and members for all their time and effort in making that so.

At the same time, we believe the council should use its relatively strong financial position, and large amounts of CIL, for the benefit of the people who contributed that money – the residents and businesses of Wealden. There is no point in holding money for the sake of it.

Amongst other things, we are stepping in to finance new medical centres, where the private market has failed, and to develop dormant assets – for instance to build a new waste depot and a solar farm at Knights Farm West.

All this is in line with our strategy of improving health and wellbeing, promoting energy from renewables and providing efficient services – our current waste depot is too small and badly located.

On the same theme, the first grants have been made from the Sports Infrastructure Fund sports and playing fields scheme – known as SIF, which is funded by Community Infrastructure Levy. We will soon be publishing details of how ward councillor budgets will work and how people can apply for grants from the separate Community Led Infrastructure Fund.

We have a new housing plan, which aims to strike the right balance between adding to our stock of 3,000 council homes and maintaining and upgrading the existing stock, and this should enable us quickly to win a share of the money being made available under the government’s Social and Affordable Housing Programme.

Our focus on the need to face up to climate change continues with a snappily entitled Climate Change Strategy and Action Plan, which details the action we plan to take over the next three years to get emissions down and so reduce people’s heating bills and dependency on the suppliers of fossil fuels – and also increase our resilience.

We are looking beyond our borders. We meet regularly with the other councils in East Sussex to help produce a plan for us all to reorganise, with the help of outside consultants, and the Southern Water Stakeholder Group – the group of 20+ councils from across the south east which we organise and chair – recently met with the Minister for Water Emma Hardy and raised with her what Grampian conditions reveal about water companies failing to adequately deal with sewerage for new developments and thus creating hold ups for housing.

We will be making progress on all of these things over the summer and autumn.