Agenda item - Chair's Communications

57.1      The Chair provided the following Communications:

“I started this week in Liverpool at the Labour Party Conference, our Party’s first conference in power for 15 years. I was pleased to Chair our rally for local government which featured our Deputy Prime Minister, our Transport Secretary Lou Haigh and the Minister for Local Government, Jim McMahon. It was inspiring to hear from our new ministers about the scale and pace this government is looking to deliver at, particularly in the areas of housing, planning and economic growth, areas we know we have huge challenges for in this city and which will make a significant difference to us.

It was also reassuring to hear the Labour Government addressing the deep-rooted inequalities that still exist within our society at every level.

Fourteen years of Conservative rule has entrenched rather than closed the inequalities gap and we now have a government that is driving change to bridge that gap.

Soon after the General Election, our Deputy Prime Minister announced that it would be inviting applications for devolution deals in areas where none currently exist and subsequently sent a letter to all upper tier authorities, inviting us to express an interest in devolution.

I believe this presents an excellent opportunity for our city so over the summer, I have engaged with as many Leaders as possible over Sussex and I look forward to continuing those conversations.

Brighton & Hove will be submitting an expression of interest, and I look forward to continuing to work with all neighbouring authorities to identify a devolution option that would deliver maximum benefits for the residents of our city and the wider Sussex region.

We also eagerly await more detail from the government on the English devolution deal and a White Paper that is expected at around the same time as the Budget next month.

I know that many of our residents feel deep climate anxiety which is why Ed Miliband trailblazing work as our Secretary of State for Energy is so important.

The government has already established a Great British Energy, the first publicly owned energy company to be established in this country for 75 years. In Brighton & Hove we are also making great strides, and we have recently appointed a Head of Net Zero, Alice Berry who will lead our new Net Zero team and will take forward our ambitions for energy and transport decarbonisation, climate adaptation and biodiversity. And they will work in partnership with central government organisations, businesses and communities to secure investment for large scale Net Zero projects. They will support the creation of new, sustainable homes and be a key part of the Greater Brighton Energy initiative which I was also pleased to launch earlier this summer.

Last week I visited Ricardo’s combined heat and power demonstrator plant just outside Haywards Heath which is an excellent example of this kind of innovation that could allow us to decarbonise our industries at pace.

I’m delighted that on today’s agenda we will be discussing a Housing Strategy for the city that sets out a clear vision for Housing services and support and outlines five priorities for the next five years and our clear ambition to tackle the housing crisis in the city.

The housing supply and affordability crisis in our city is well-documented, we know many people are unable to afford a mortgage or pay their rent and too many people our in our temporary or emergency accommodation. Our number one priority is to increase the number of genuinely affordable homes being built in the city with the ambition to deliver 2,000 of the homes and more over the next give years. We particularly need more council homes and to be building them and buying them back at a greater rate than has been the case over the past few years.

As well as making this a priority in the Housing Strategy, in response to the government's consultation on the new national policy planning framework, we have made clear requests to government including a review on land availability and boundaries, giving council’s greater enforcement powers to manage developments and the ability for council’s to introduce principle residence policies to manage short-term lets in our city. We look forward to implementing our strategy and working at pace to deliver affordable homes. Our new Director of Housing Regeneration, Darren Levy will be joining us next month and will be driving the regeneration of our ageing housing stock.

Finally on Housing, I want to address head on the work we are doing in response to the Housing Regulators report. The report identified a number of serious failings in the safety and quality compliance around certain area of health and safety and a backlog of routine repairs.

We fully accept the regulators findings and welcome their engagement with us over the past year. We’ve introduced a raft of urgent measures to ensure we are fully compliant with the building safety and quality standards under the Buildings Safety Act and the Social Housing Regulation Act 2023 as soon as possible.

Our key priority will always be the safety of our residents, and we are fully committed to meeting these regulatory requirements.

Before we move on to today’s business, I want to highlight one of the papers that is before us today, the Parking Review. I want to thank everybody that has been involved with progressing this piece of work. The policies on parking that were implemented by the last Administration were ill-thought out, costly to our residents, damaging to our visitor economy and completely undermined the Council’s own Accessibility Strategy.

Since May 2023, our Administration has taken significant steps to correcting this, immediately putting a stop to further parking charges hikes, we have reduced the parking charges in the council’s car parks and we are trialling the return of pay and display machines to ensure that our older residents who may be digitally excluded can access parking in the city.