At this time of year, thoughts inevitably turn to Christmas, and you will spot some festive notes making their way into this edition of my column. Next week will be a true Christmas special, but with many events and programmes underway ahead of the holidays it is timely to mention some festive things ahead of that. Before that though, some updates.
In the last edition I promised more on the clean-up work in the wake of Storm Darragh. We weren’t hit as hard as many areas of the country, but numerous trees came down, there were areas of flooding, and many people had fences and other property damaged. To anyone who was affected, you have my sympathies. I am proud of the work of the Council’s teams who have been outstanding in their response, getting roads and pavements cleared and making things safe even whilst the storm was still raging. I also want to thank all the residents of our great borough who went out and contributed to the clear up, sweeping paths and clearing things out of the roads. I would urge you to only ever do this when it is safe, but it shows a real community spirit – something on which we pride ourselves.
I also promised to follow up on the proposal to charge for garden waste (green bin) collections. The report was approved by cabinet last night, so it is looking like that will be the path that we go down. I do not wish to say again everything I said last time, but I will reiterate that it seems to me to be a fair way to cover the roughly £1.8m cost of the service. I am personally gutted by the need to bring this in, having resisted for so long. However, without a clear change in the way local government is funded, especially for caring services, this may not be the last difficult pill that councils, especially those with lower council tax rates like ours, will have to swallow.
There will be Christmas fun day tomorrow (Saturday 14 December) in Solihull town centre, organised by the BID. Local choirs will provide a seasonal soundtrack throughout, with various activities and attractions complementing the already installed festive village on the high street and Mell Square All the details are available here. Don’t forget, Santa has been in his grotto next to Costa in Mell Square for a few weeks now - you can visit him for free each weekend!
Not everyone has a warm and welcoming home to go to at Christmas, we will be supporting rough sleepers in Solihull as we do throughout the year with our Change into Action programme. We are also supporting the regional winter campaign to help Change into Action continue to make a real difference. It provides targeted support through dedicated teams, working with your help to get people off the streets and turn their lives around.
The Institute for Fiscal Studies published an interesting report this week, it lays out the scale of the SEND funding issue facing national and local government and most importantly, of course, impacting on children and their families. It is worth a read. I have mentioned the significant rises in expenditure on SEND services and the issues that causes for balancing our budget in previous messages. This report gives the whole picture and suggests the need for change so that councils, including us, do not have to continue shouldering rising costs we can ill afford. My main concern is for the children and their families, we must be given the resources to provide them with high-quality support in and out of school.
We’ve opened a Family Hubs outreach centre in Shirley, which will complement our four existing hub sites in providing services, activities and support to families in the heart of their communities. You can read all about it by following the link above, and we are pushing to open two further outreach centres in Solihull town centre and Meriden across the next few months. I am really thrilled by this new move. It represents our drive to provide services on a “whole family” approach, recognising that when some problems arise, they are often rooted in events early in life and the more we can help at that stage, the better.
Our Holiday activities and Food (HAF) programme is running during the Christmas holidays, where we are again supporting eligible families by providing children’s and family activities. We know from the feedback we get that these free activities make a huge difference to many families, with a wide range of activities and a meal provided for all participants. Our leisure partner, Everyone Active, are providing family activities at both leisure centres (Tudor Grange and North Solihull). In addition to this, the HAF programme is funding 1000 hampers for families in receipt of benefits related free school meals.
Winter can be a particularly challenging time of year for some of our residents, Here2Help provides details of food and energy support including details of food banks in the Solihull area.
I want to sound a cautious note of hope following events in Syria this week. Things are very much still in transition, but the end of Assad’s brutal and repressive regime will hopefully give the millions of displaced Syrians around the world a chance to return to their homeland if they wish. We will see what the future brings.
Finally, I would like to give a plug to Solihull’s annual claim to festive fame – local business Woods Farm provides Christmas trees for Covent Garden, Downing Street, and Windsor Castle. They are a real success story, and I congratulate them on their national prominence at this time of year.
Thanks, enjoy your weekend, hopefully it will be a little calmer on the weather front than last week!
Councillor Ian Courts, Leader of Solihull Council.