Conservatives make service delivery the focus for July's Full Council
Our Conservative Councillors have set out what we want to achieve on behalf of residents at next Thursday’s full meeting of Brighton & Hove City Council.
Our goal is to focus the Council on several areas where its services are failing residents, and also propose a civic event for the 2022-3 municipal year that would boost civic pride and tourism.
A key theme of this current Council, which was elected to a 4-year term in May 2019, is undoubtedly that it has been a Council that has lost its focus on local matters in the City.
Statistics bear this out. Since 2019, Labour/Green Councillors have spent over 76% of their allotted time at Full Council Meetings for Notices of Motion raising international and national matters well beyond the scope of the job of the Council or a Councillor.
The two debates held nuclear weapons perhaps have most vividly encapsulated what has been going on under this Labour/Green Coalition in the eyes of voters.
In our view, there is a clear consequence of the loss of focus of this council: The Council has taken its eye off the ball on basic service delivery. This is increasingly being borne out by what residents are seeing, reporting and experiencing across the city and the Conservatives we will be raising examples of this on Thursday on behalf of residents.
Our highly experienced Councillors Dawn Barnett and Dee Simson will be raising the issue of neighbourhood safety in the City, with both councillors set to shine the spotlight on areas of service provision where we feel that the council has taken its eye of the ball.
Cllr Barnett will be highlighting the lack of service provision to protect elderly tenants in over-50s blocks of council housing from cuckooing; and pushing for the installation of modern security systems including CCTV cameras at these blocks.
Cuckooing is a practice where people take over a person’s home and use the property to facilitate exploitation. It takes the name from cuckoos who take over the nests of other birds. The most common form of cuckooing is where drug dealers take over a person’s home and use it to store or distribute drugs, and this has become increasingly prevalent in over-50s housing blocks in Brighton & Hove, with vulnerable residents targeted.
On the issue of drugs and cuckooing the Council needs to get its house in order – quite literally.
Conservative Communities Spokesperson Cllr Dee Simson will be raising the wider problems with the Council’s monitoring of its CCTV cameras across the city.
CCTV is a vital service for any modern local authority to protect residents from crime and antisocial behaviour in council facilities and public spaces; however as Cllr Simson will highlight, Brighton & Hove City Council’s CCTV monitoring room now sits virtually unused and unmonitored.
With the City ranking so highly in Sussex for neighbourhood crime, it is of great concern that the council’s existing facilities for CCTV monitoring are not being fully utilised. Cllr Simson has vowed to get to the bottom of what is going wrong at the Council.
In a similar vein, Councillor Robert Nemeth will be seeking to get to the bottom of significant problems with the City Allotment Service, which has effectively collapsed and is causing great frustration to allotment holders and those on the waiting list.
The system for allocating allotments at the City’s 35 sites has ground to a halt after the Council brought the lettings system - that had previously been working well - in house. The result has been service collapse - 150-200 allotments have remained unlet for a period of two years, despite there being 2,500 residents who have paid £17 to be on a waiting list for an allotment.
Cllr Nemeth will be tabling a series of questions and commissioning a report to focus the Council on putting in place actions to have the issues fixed.
Looking to 2022, long-standing Conservative Cllr Garry Peltzer Dunn, celebrating a remarkable 50 years as a Councillor, will be putting forward a proposal to light up the historic Hove Beacon in time for the Platinum Jubilee next year, with a new design for a special LED lighting effect.
This historic beacon, dating from the time of the Spanish Armanda, would be a fantastic attraction for our city moving forward, reflecting on our past and looking to the future, while also helping our City participate in a civic event for the Platinum Jubilee.
There’s plenty of local matters to attend to – and our Conservative Councillors look forward to putting them forward with vigour on Thursday night!
ENDS.
