My report to Council

Posted By: Alan Taylor
Date Posted: 19/10/2009

Thank you Mr Mayor for the opportunity to report to the Council the latest developments on various matters relating to the Leader of the Council.

I usually take the opportunity of my report to Council to tell Members of all the wonderful things that are happening across our Borough, and they still are, but today I want to highlight some of the challenges that our Borough will face as a result of the continuing recession.

The Audit Commission has just published a report entitled ‘When It Comes To The Crunch’. The report identifies the different ways in which the public sector can support the community and our businesses in a recession. It also identifies metropolitan districts, and particularly deprived metropolitan districts like Rochdale Borough, as being places most at risk and most vulnerable to the negative impacts of the recession.

The report highlights the different needs that our Borough will have as the recession progresses.

We need to protect our businesses and our people as the recession starts to bite. We need to support our communities as unemployment and associated social issues start to emerge, and then we need to help our businesses and our community to recover as we start to come out of the recession.

As I have said boroughs like Rochdale:

• with a high dependence upon manufacturing:
• an economy that is already restructuring, and
• pre-existing high levels of unemployment and deprivation

will suffer disproportionately in a recession.

So I see a challenging future for Rochdale Borough as we start to come out of recession, with employment lagging behind economic growth. As a Council we are determined to do everything within our powers to support the people and businesses of our Borough. Our recession action plan has been cited in the Audit Commission report as an example of best practice for forward planning.

So our immediate initiatives to encourage activity in our town centre, such as Free Parking and the Town Centres Spruce Up, will I am sure have had an immediate effect. Similarly, our longer term initiatives, Supporting People, seeking new jobs, aiming to enhance their skills and dealing with the other consequences of unemployment will, I believe, lay a firm foundation for the future.

Our Mortgage Rescue scheme, for instance, is one of the most effective in the country, being used by Government as an example of best practice.

The Audit Commission’s report provides a clear insight into why we have been so hard hit by the recession, with major job losses in low skilled employment and in our dominant employment sectors. The situation in Rochdale will get significantly worse before it gets better, but I believe that our current planning and our initiatives already underway, should give us all hope that we will come out of the challenges and difficulties that the recession poses as quickly and robustly as possible.


Signature

Councillor Alan Taylor
Leader of the Council
25 September 2009