It’s in moments of greatest challenge that we come up with some of the best ideas and there are some great and very different things happening at the moment in Shropshire.
Doing things differently is something we now embrace and we’re taking forward as a confident and capable council, which continues to deliver good services that matter to local people.
I’m sure you’ll appreciate the growing demand for social care and rising costs accounts for almost £4 in every £5 we spend as a council. This means we are being forced to make some very tough decisions. The last few months have been incredibly difficult and this will only get harder as the steps to cut our spending by £62 million starts to become more visible and impact on our residents and staff.
If you live here, you’ll see us more and more, asking for your views through consultation on how we should make these changes.
However, in spite of their scale, we will not let these challenges define us.
We are not alone. Many other councils up and down the country are facing similar challenges and must also make tough decisions. By sharing our resources and skills, we can still make a huge difference. Working together also gives us a louder voice which is crucial if we want our rural county to thrive.
One such example is the Marches Forward Partnership, alongside Herefordshire, Monmouthshire and Powys councils, we took another important step forward last month (April).
It’s an agreement which is ground-breaking. Linked by our shared challenges and perhaps more importantly shared opportunities, all partners are committed to working cross border, cross country and cross party on major projects that are in the overall best interests of the region. We now want to bring all this together into a Manifesto for the Marches that sets out the ask and the opportunities.
By working together, we can secure funding support from the UK and Welsh governments as well as with a wide range of other partners. This will unlock more investment and explore new approaches to make a real difference to the 750,000 people who live in the Marches and the thousands of businesses here.
It’s still early days, but we have so much in common and I’m excited about what the future holds.
We are also very active in the County Councils Network (CCN), a cross-party special interest group, representing England’s upper tier local authorities, with whom we share many similar challenges such a transport costs or increased costs of providing care services in a large rural county such as Shropshire. Together we’re pushing the case for areas such as Shropshire and to push for changes that help to ease the pressures.
We’re not just working with other councils though. In April we joined forces with a private company in what will be a UK council first – an inspirational carbon saving business innovation.
It involves developing a pyrolysis biochar demonstration plant which will heat organic matter at high temperatures without oxygen to create gases and oils which can be used to produce clean, renewable electricity.
It also creates biochar, a carbon storing-form of charcoal, that has many uses and is of great benefit environmentally.
Again, it’s very early days but I’m incredibly excited about this potential. The project has already attracted interest from other UK local authorities and companies internationally, putting Shropshire firmly on the map.
Whilst we are working incredibly hard to mitigate the difficult financial situation we are in, we do this alongside remaining positive, being innovative and delivering the very best services we can for the residents of Shropshire.