Yesterday at our cabinet meeting we started to address some of the failures left by the previous Labour run County Council.

Under Labour many important services have not been properly invested in nor properly managed. Lib Dem councillors working with colleagues in the joint administration are determined to turn our county around.

This starts with fixing some of our frontline services and tackling climate change.

People working in the care sector in County Durham have been woefully under paid by Labour. By increasing the wages of those helping our most vulnerable residents we can make sure that we reduce the risk of staff shortages but also give people a wage that is far better. We’ve already intervened months before the start of the next financial year to pay care workers a much better wage.

• Under Labour most of our team working to tackle Climate Change were not even on permanent contracts. We are fixing that so that we can make a real difference making our County’s environment better. This will end up saving us money too.
• Under Labour road sweepers were cut by more than a third. We don’t even know where they have been! So we are installing the hardware and software so we know exactly which streets have been swept and which have not. And we are going to increase the number of sweepers too.
• Labour left our neighbourhood wardens teams without a proper management structure. We are fixing that and making sure they have the tools and the management that is needed to improve our communities.
• In Pest Control Labour left us with delays of up to 10 weeks to investigate issues. We are putting in the staff to treat these issues, investigate more quickly and also be able to assist with a welfare and community scheme to tackle issues when residents simply can’t afford treatments.
• In allotments, despite having hundreds of sites to manage, under Labour we had next to no staff to address issues at these sites. By putting in the monitoring and enforcement needed we can start to increase the number of allotments being used for the purpose they should be used and tackle nuisances. In our area we are also getting close to being able to start work on providing new allotments in Framwellgate Moor working closely with the Parish Council too.
• So many of our older wheelie bins are starting to break, but Labour didn’t leave any money in the budget for replacements so we are putting in that investment too.

We are also dealing with some significant increases in costs. The Council is expecting to see a £3.1m increase in energy costs for running council services. Labour could have invested more in solar panels, insulating our buildings, increasing the number of electric council vehicles to keep down these costs. We are going to do this to make sure that our council’s energy bills can be brought under control. We should be charging council vehicles with solar energy produced by the council, heating buildings with green energy produced onsite.

This week at Abbey Leisure Centre 90kw of Solar Panels were installed, along with Heat pumps which will run off the solar power, heating the building, LED lighting is being installed to cut electric bills and we will be looking at doing this on many more buildings. By cutting our energy bills we will have more money to protect frontline services.

This and much more investment will be announced over the coming weeks as we start to turn around our county.