Agenda item - Leader and Portfolio Holder's Announcements

To receive announcements by the Leader and Portfolio Holders.

15.1    The Leader of the Council and Portfolio Holder’s gave the following communications.

Thank you very much, Madam Mayor, and I do want to take this opportunity, Madam Mayor and my fellow Councillors, since we last met Brighton and Hove has continued to strengthen its position regionally and nationally. We've launched the Sussex and Brighton Strategic Authority, unlocking £1.4 billion over 30 years, bringing to life our Labour Group's vision for our city and our wider region. I'm honoured to have been elected as its first chair and next week, at our third formal meeting, it is proposed that I will be the Lead Member for Housing and Spatial Development, while my colleague, Councillor Taylor, will be the Lead Member for Finance and Investment. This is a game changer for our city and region. And today, I'm really pleased that we at this Full Council meeting will be making appointments to the audit and scrutiny committees of that new authority. And in this week in which the former Mayor of Greater Manchester, Andy Burnham, has become our Prime Minister, and you can clap that Labour colleagues, made a passionate case for devolution being at the centre of our party's vision for social justice. I'm proud that through the leadership of this group on this issue, Brighton and Hove is now perfectly positioned to reap the rewards of greater devolution.

The new Number 10 North Office is going to provide leadership on local and regional growth, and with more funding and powers coming our way, we will now be able to start making the investment decisions to grow our local economy, create good jobs, end the crisis in youth unemployment, build more affordable homes, and sort out our transport connectivity. And we are already moving at pace, Madam Mayor. I'm pleased to announce today that our bid for funds to undertake a feasibility study put on bus franchising has been successful. The government is passporting even more money than we asked for, over half a million pounds, to our new strategic authority to look at proposals for bus franchising across Sussex and Brighton.

It has been a good week for buses, Madam Mayor, and everybody that uses them. The £2 bus cap announcement by our new Labour Government is excellent news for this city, where so many of us take the bus to get to work, to school, to college, health appointments, or to see family and friends. We have been working hard to keep bus fares as low as we can within our existing enhanced partnership system, recently launching a £1 bus fare for residents in Whitehawk, and from this September offering free bus travel for our care leavers between 18 and 25. But this additional pledge from government, which will start in January next year, is hugely, hugely welcome. It's going to make a huge difference to residents in this city.

Our new government has also today promised to slash business rates for our hospitality sector by 20% and I am lobbying the government to include mixed venues, such as Revenge, in the city which offer live music along with club nights and other entertainment to be included in the current and future criteria for this relief.

This announcement is so critical to our city, Madam Mayor, where 24,000 people are employed in the hospitality sector. Today's announcement is also hot on the heels of the government's move to scrap VAT on electricity bills, which was made on Tuesday this week, representing an over £5 million investment and savings to households in this city, and it's this kind of policymaking that will also support our transition to clean energy. We also welcome the decision to scrap digital ID, which was never in our manifesto.

Like our government, Madam Mayor, we are relentlessly focused on tackling the cost of living, which is why last month, building on a previous Labour Group notice of motion, we have provided new pilot funding to Pelican Parcels for their vital work in providing critical supplies to families with newborn babies. We continue to escalate our Council Home Buyback programme, as well as building new council and affordable homes right across the city, from Moulsecoomb, to Sackville Road, to Portslade.

Our Labour Government's Renters’ Rights Act is now in force, preventing no-fault evictions, preventing disproportionate rent increases, and bidding wars. This is the biggest step to change in tenant rights in a generation and nowhere, nowhere is it more needed than in this city where around a third of our residents rent.

And our Labour Group's landlord Licencing scheme has generated positive results in the wards where it currently exists, Kemptown, Moulsecoomb and Bevendean, Queen's Park, Whitehawk and Marina, which is why from October this year we will be rolling out landlord licencing in Central Hove and in Regency bringing even more much needed support to renters to demand adequate standards in their homes. Where other groups in this chamber prevaricated Madam Mayor and delayed, we took action and we have got results for working people.

And in a further big generational like change, we have successfully persuaded our government that, as well as getting better, Brighton and Hove should get bigger as well. In one of the biggest changes to our boundary in living memory, the government has decided that our boundary should merge with East Saltdean, Telscombe, and Peacehaven. I am delighted with this decision, which supports our evidence on how in reality people in those communities travel in and out of the city for work, for leisure, to attend school, college, healthcare appointments, see family and friends, and so on. The Centre for Cities has said that we are one of the most underbounded cities in the country and our Labour group has been clear that we need to put this right to unlock growth, good jobs, better living standards, and transport connectivity.

I'll be reassuring residents in the areas that we are due to merge with that we will always respect their unique identities, just as we do already with communities that are already part of our city from Rottingdean to Portslade. In order to give effect to this change, we'll be establishing a shadow authority for the new footprint with elections taking place next May. Current councillor terms will be extended for a year to facilitate this transition and the new authority will go live on the 1st April 2028.

Madam Mayor, we have also been working hard to ensure that this is always a city that we can be proud of here in Brighton and Hove, with a new world-leading seafront prospectus that was published just a few months ago, we've been restoring our heritage lanterns, rolling out deep cleans, making over a million pounds further investment into our waste and recycling services. And we've also continued our work to be a more inclusive city. We launched our new civic leadership programme in conjunction with Operation Black Vote, creating new pathways into civic leadership in roles such as magistracy, school governorships for underrepresented communities. There are over 30 places available at no cost to successful applicants and I would encourage anybody who is curious to apply.

We've brought forward a new SEND Sufficiency Plan, helping expand local support for children and young people with special educational needs and disabilities and we were proud to receive renewed Council of Sanctuary status, recognising our commitment to welcoming and supporting people seeking safety and refuge. Last weekend we hosted Trans Pride, the largest Trans Pride protest in Europe, and we have rededicated our Boar's Head Memorial in a moving ceremony to mark the 110th anniversary of the day that Sussex died. There has been so much positive feedback on the new look memorial as part of Valley Gardens 3 and the centrepiece, pedestrian access, and views of the Pavilion that we have created.

Madam Mayor, since we last met, our city saw off far right agitators that came from outside of this city to stir up division. We worked hard with our One Voice partnership to support minority communities in advance of this planned march, and I made sure that our city's anti-racist values were communicated clearly. Following the announcement of another planned march, originally set for the 8th August, I wrote to Sussex Police to stress the impact of racist campaigning, and I am pleased that the organisers have now withdrawn.

Madam Mayor, we've been putting our values into action, whether it is our new Unpaid Carers Strategy, whether it's launching our inequality review, whether it's the progress we've made on pay equity for staff here at the council. And Madam Mayor, since we last met, we have also experienced stark heatwaves that remind us of the importance of our work on decarbonisation and climate adaptation. I will be pushing for the Sussex energy work that we established when we chaired the Greater Brighton Economic Board to be made part of our new strategic authority. We've taken a major leap forward in the last few months with our work on solar across Sussex and our goal is to reach energy independence in our county by 2040.

Turning to today's agenda, I'm pleased to see the Coldean Neighbourhood Plan, which I know has come about after a huge amount of work from the local community in Coldean, the appointment of two new independent persons under the Localism Act, the review of political balance following the recent Goldsmith by-election, and the appointments, as I mentioned, that we are making to the strategic authority, for their Audit and Governance Committee and their Overview and Scrutiny Committee. I'm also pleased to see the review of the Council's Constitution, making good on our pledge to be a responsive council and reducing the deadline for public questions from eight working days to four. This will allow residents to submit questions after the agenda has been published and it will strengthen democracy in our city, public participation, and council decision-making. Finally, in our Youth Justice Action Plan, I'm pleased to see this coming forward, building on our work to reduce first time entrance to the youth justice system. Thank you, Madam Mayor. I will finish there.