Social Inclusion Select Committee
Last night (Monday) saw a meeting of the Social Inclusion Select Committee, amongst the items for discussion were reports on the sustainable communities act, affordable housing sub committee and a monitoring report on High Peak Community Housing and the High Peak Community Safety Partnership.
The meeting also received a presentation from the relatively new head of ‘B’ Division Chief Superintendent Peter Lewis, more on that to come shortly.
The reports on the sustainable communities act was around work that had been done by a sub committee that had been established to look at whether that council should sign up and ‘opt in’ to this act that was introduced last year.
The act was a private members bill put forward by a Conservative MP following a campaign by the Local Works coalition (www.localworks.org) and aims to give council’s working in partnership with locals additional powers (where needed) to tackle issues within there communities.
Following an initial consultation process with parish and town council’s earlier this year, the sub committee were recommending two proposals to be put forward by the council for further consideration, along with recommending that the council should opt in to the process. The two proposals that the council were recommending were Free transport for school children and switching traffic lights to flashing amber between 12 midnight and 5.00am to reduce carbon emissions and it will be interesting to see what feedback we get and if the council’s executive agree with the work of the sub committee.
On affordable housing a good report has been put together by another sub committee on how the council can make further improvements on the amount of affordable housing available, for my own two pence I flagged up that more needs to be done to ensure that areas in the High Peak under the control of the Peak Park need to be included within affordable house building targets along with welcoming efforts been made to improve the involvement and funding from the Tameside and Glossop PCT and again stressing the need for early consultation with both residents and local councillors where any sites have been suggested for housing development.