The AAP  meetings I attended this evening agreed priorities for the coming financial year for the Durham City area and surrounding villages.

You can find out more about Durham AAP here: http://www.durham.gov.uk/Pages/Service.aspx?ServiceId=6508

I was keen to make sure that Village Development was one of the priorities and have been successful in this. I hope this will allow for both discussion and schemes in the villages surrounding Durham City to be developed in the coming year.

In addition my continued push to get action on Housing and Empty Homes has resulted in an unexpected boost. The government recently announced additional funding to develop local schemes to tackle empty homes problems. Local organisation DASH (see here for more info) is to put together a bid for funding and support towards the goals of affordable housing and empty properties. The County council had shown little interest in our area in relation to Empty Homes, now there will be some funding to kick this off from the AAP and potentially down the line some success in bringing empty properties back into use.

An additional change is that whereas previously there was a dedicated Climate Change group, the AAP has agreed that every task group will have a dedicated person for Climate Change within it so that all decisions and spending take this into account going forwards.

So the four priorities for the coming financial year will be:

City Centre Development

Village Development

Children and Young People

Voluntary Sector

As I see it, this will allow us to continue to improve facilities for young people, improve our villages and help the voluntary sector which has seen cuts from County Council funding. It may also allow for consideration of Community Buildings given the threats from the council to close community buildings.

If you are interested in joining any of the Task Groups let me know or email dcaap@durham.gov.uk