Observer Column 24 January 2025

This week sees our budget and corporate plan consultation kick off. There are lots of ways to give us your feedback. I will be at Priory Meadow on Wednesday 29 January from 2.00 – 4.00 pm and we will be running a Facebook Live Q and A session also on Monday 27 January at 9.00 am. All the documents are available online at hastings.gov.uk with a simple survey for you to fill in. Deadline for initial feedback is 3 February.

Our focus continues to be seeking financial stability and tackling homelessness but we need to have wider conversations as a town on how we shape the government’s declared intention to give more power back to local people in their devolution agenda. So, this consultation is just the start of that conversation. I will be talking to all our local voluntary organisations and local businesses to hear their views as well.

But we are still getting on with everyday practical solutions. Next Tuesday’s cabinet meeting will be discussing practical steps to address land stability issues in the town with measures to restrict permitted development in areas that are already identified as suffering from landslides. This should ensure that any work that involves excavation, has to have demonstrated that measures to control land instability have been undertaken before work commences.

We will also be approving a new post to support Healthy aging, funded by Public Health to ensure all our work contributes to helping residents live well into older age, building on the work done by Hastings Voluntary Action since the commitment some years ago by the council for Hastings to become an age friendly community. We know how much older people contribute to our communities and with one in three people due to be over 65 by 2037 in East Sussex its essential we do all we can to ensure we can all enjoy a healthy and fulfilling life in older age.

You are welcome as always to come and ask questions in the first half an hour of the cabinet meeting. It has been moved to Tuesday next week to allow councillors to attend the Holocaust Memorial Day event at White Rock Theatre on Monday evening at 6.30. All are welcome to attend, no need to book.

This week we heard that the University of Brighton Academy Trust is to be dissolved as the trustees have lost faith in the leadership of the trust. The academies ‘project’ is clearly not working for Hastings. The Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill needs to be amended to allow failing academy schools to be brought back under local authority control. I hope our MP Helena Dollimore will champion such an amendment. All our secondary schools in Hastings are failing our children with all of them ‘requiring improvement’ according to OFSTED. We need to remove the ‘business model’ from the education system and do more to give our children the education they deserve.