Denise Craghill said:
This is far from a perfect offer However, there are some very positive elements which the City can’t afford to miss out on. The offer of £18m of new Government funding for the region each year for the next 30 years, along with other investments and potential service improvements for York residents.
If and when this goes ahead, we want to see the benefits of the economic prosperity the deal is aiming for shared more equally and inclusively across the region and within York; we want to see the creation of new green jobs; and we want to see improved stewarding of our amazing shared natural environment put right at the centre of mayoral policies.
We welcome the commitment in the deal to the additional £50m funding for York Central. This needs to be used to make York Central a truly trail-blazing zero carbon development that offers affordable housing to York residents.
Hopefully a proportion of the further £13m in the deal to help deliver affordable homes on brownfield land in the next few years will come to York to help deliver this ambition, along with the closer strategic partnership with Homes England that forms part of the deal.
In the immediate term, we also very much welcome the £2m allocated this financial year to York to deliver a programme of retrofitted recycled shared ownership properties, building on the council’s previous successful schemes in this respect.
The commitment of £7m to help drive ‘green economic growth’ is welcome, if a bit short on detail. Creating a ‘carbon negative’ region and promoting low carbon energy projects as part of the Local Energy Plans currently in production, is very much to be welcomed. The region has huge potential for genuinely sustainable, low carbon renewable energy production.
Our key concern here is the role that seems to be envisaged for Drax in all of this – the biggest carbon emitter in the UK; the second largest global producer of wood pellets. Drax imports and burns more wood from old growth forests in the United States and Canada each year than all of the UK produces in a year, destroying local communities along the way. Whether unproven carbon capture technology one day delivers or not, this is never going to be a sustainable business – and we do need a rethink of its role in our zero carbon plans.
Drax aside, our main reservations about the deal are the loss of some powers from City of York council. The idea of devolution is supposed to be that powers are always devolved down from the higher level and not up from the level closest to residents.
In this case there is concern about the transfer of Strategic Transport powers from City of York council up to the new Combined Authority. This means it will be very important for York to have a very clear policy of its own for a sustainable and inclusive transport system for the city and to argue very strongly for this within the Combined Authority.
On the plus side the carbon negative ambition should hold out the prospect of delivering a sustainable transport policy across the region, providing better services and tackling climate change – we have to be optimistic! And of course, the option for the mayor to bring forward bus franchising is something we very much welcome and would like to see taken forward – bus services should be provided in the interests of local residents, not for private profit.
We would have preferred to see a more inclusive Combined Authority governance structure, involving elected members from all parties and parts of the region. That said, the current proposals offer some significant checks and balances on the power of the mayor. Whilst there may be some concern that these could work more effectively to stop things happening rather than to drive forward the changes that we need, we want to be positive about this and contribute to a commitment to consensus decision making that will deliver the ambitious outcomes sought by this devolution scheme.
This is now out for public consultation; please make sure you have you say.
