THE Press asked leading York councillors to look ahead to 2024. Here Labour council leader councillor Claire Douglas talks about the challenges and things to look forward to.

Labour came to power this May knowing the council could not continue to overspend as it had and strong leadership would be required to stabilise the council’s finances, while maintaining those core services our residents rely on.

For most councils their primary objective is simply to stay afloat. I can well understand why the public might have become immune to hearing accounts of councils having no money because they’ve been hearing it for 13 years, likely longer.

The reason this time is different is due to a perfect storm of discretionary services having already been cut back significantly, ongoing increasing demand for services the council legally must provide, and rampant inflation over the past two years adding hugely to the council’s costs.

We’re being honest with our residents and businesses and not pulling the wool over their eyes about what the council can do in the future. This difficult position would be true for any party running the council. People don’t want to see public service cuts, but they respect honesty and understand how constrained councils are due to low national funding settlements that leave them with few options. We are optimistic even though these huge challenges are with us to stay. There’s an enormous amount of goodwill in York and we have a great volunteering tradition that helps support many of our most vulnerable residents. But we are bottom of the national pile for public services funding, as reported by the IFS earlier this year, and there’s no escaping that fact.

So, we’ve decided to work in partnership with our city’s businesses, organisations, residents and voluntary sector to be aspirational and see what we can achieve together. One of the most obvious examples of this is the start of delivery of our new Council Plan commitment on free school meals. We committed to mobilise the city to help deliver free school meals to primary school children in York as part of our pledge to tackle affordability in the cost-of-living crisis. Looking to the new year, 2024 will continue to be extremely difficult but we’ll remain focussed on delivering on the pledges we were elected on. As well as getting underway with a whole-school free school meal pilot in January, another pledge will be delivered very quickly on 4th January as we roll back the ban on Blue Badge holder access to the city centre. It’s essential those residents locked out until now regain access to their city. Counter-terrorism measures are almost complete, and we’ll keep the new scheme under review to ensure it meets the needs of all residents and visitors to our city.

May 2024 will see the first election of a directly elected Mayor for York and North Yorkshire. This is a political role with responsibility for a multi-million-pound devolved budget from Government. It represents one ray of light for local government in its efforts to respond to over a decade of austerity and will have a key part to play in York on economic growth and regeneration, housing, carbon reduction and transport.

York residents can be assured that we’ll be working to ensure the new Mayor and Combined Authority delivers for the city and their funding decisions reflect EACH of our local Council Plan priority themes: Equalities; Affordability; Climate and Health.

I wish all York residents a very happy Christmas and good wishes for 2024.