Last Tuesday was the regular Full Council meeting for Cumberland Council. This is the full meeting of the Council, which every Councillor attends.

Minutes of the Executive
Minutes of two meetings of the Executive were presented. I asked a question about school attendance: I welcomed the fact that the Council was signing up to a charter on school attendance, but I asked the Executive Member for Education if she could tell members how Cumberland compared with other councils on levels of school attendance, particularly since Covid. Sadly, she didn’t have the answer and I asked if this could be sent to all Councillors.

Capital Investment Strategy and Asset Management Strategy
These were two major pieces of work, which were were informed are still ongoing, around what the Council will do with its significant property assets.

The biggest items were around Council offices, with Cumberland Council inheriting all the previous office buildings of Carlisle, Allerdale, Copeland and half of Cumbria County Council’s buildings. The strategy identified retained use of Cumbria House in Carlisle as the main HQ, and said that we would look at short term development of two other major buildings – the Civic Centre in Carlisle and Allerdale House in Workington (IE some work to keep the buildings in use and looking at sharing some space with statutory sector partners.). The Copeland Centre in Whitehaven will also see some development be part of a wider property review for Whitehaven. Park House north of Carlisle and West Cumbria House were both identified as long term development sites for future rental and council income, rather than council use directly.

I asked a question about asset transfer of unwanted / unused assets to Town and Parish Councils. I know there are some sites in our area that might be of use to Parish Council and I asked about whether the Council yet had a policy and a process in place. The answer is not yet.

Written Questions
The Liberal Democrat group asked our full quota of written questions with notice, the only group to do so, on issues as diverse as the airport, coal mines, highways and buses. The full questions and answers are in a separate post here:
https://timpickstone.mycouncillor.org.uk/2024/07/16/answers-to-questions/#page-content

Notice of Motion – Crisis in Local Government Funding
On behalf of the Liberal Democrat Group I proposed a motion on the crisis in local government funding, particularly timely given the election of a new Government the previous week.

The motion highlighted:

• That one in five English councils are in danger of issuing Section 114 (bankruptcy) notices in this year or next
• Half of all English Councils are not confident that they have enough money to fulfil their legal duties next year.
• That the spending power of English local councils as been reduced by 29% in real terms in the 11 years to 2021-22.
  
• In Cumberland, the budget gap for 2025-26 is £17.7 million, which is a very serious challenge for the Council

We asked for the Council to lobby the Government, for example through our four new MPs and through our membership of the Local Government Association to tackle local government funding, and in particular give councils three-year funding deals (currently we get money year by year).

The Labour Group amended the motion, in my view to make it less strong, but in the end this was agreed with Councillors from all parties in support.

The full text of our motion, and the other agenda items are here:
https://cumberland.moderngov.co.uk/ieListDocuments.aspx?CId=311&MId=14237&Ver=4

Let me know if you have any questions or comments.