My good friend Peter Kyle will welcome you to Brighton and Hove this weekend; it is a privilege to work with him leading and representing the city that hosts the Labour party conference. Those familiar with our city will immediately notice one big change: a 160-metre tall tower on the promenade outside the Hilton Metropole. This is the i360, a monument to a Green administration that reached for the sky but never left the ground due to the divisions and barriers that they inflicted on themselves.
There was little for Labour people to cheer about in the days following 7 May, but here in Brighton and Hove we not only gained the parliamentary seat of Hove from the Tories, but we brought to an end the first Green-led council administration and put the city under Labour control for the first time since 2007. We took a dozen council seats from the Greens, including six in Caroline Lucas’s Brighton Pavilion constituency. Labour overtook the Conservatives, who even with the general election surge could only add two seats to their total, to become the largest group on the council. Labour has 23 seats, the Tories 20 and the Greens 11.
Our ten-point ‘contract with Brighton and Hove’, and our manifesto ‘A council that works for you’ pledged that we would return a focus on practical policies that delivered sound governance and properly-run local services. We said that we would bring Labour and co-operative values to a new approach to running the city, based on neighbourhoods and communities, aimed at tackling poverty and inequality, and determined to spread the benefits of our city’s economy to all.
In our first 100 days, despite the rump of Green councillors pledging to ‘create havoc’, we have set up our fairness commission, launched our employment and skills task force, set out a strategy to clean our streets and improve our recycling rates, approved the building of 57 new council homes and begun the work of preparing the authority to deal with a £68m budget gap by 2019. Every day we seek to empower our neighbourhoods, bring in new investment, make the most of our assets and plan ahead alongside our partners in the public, voluntary and business sectors to build a resilient and co-operative city.
In the next 100 days we will approve plans to restore our seafront, replace our ageing leisure centre, build hundreds more affordable homes, set up an apprenticeship training company, and agree the replacement of the Brighton Centre with a world-class arena near Brighton Marina. Tough decisions on services lay ahead, but we have plans to offset the impact of Conservative government cuts on the lowest-income residents through measures to reduce fuel poverty and more.
We will not be diverted from finding practical and realistic answers to the Tory cuts by those who think we should stand on the beach, Canute-like, waving a ‘no to austerity’ banner while the tide comes in. We will build boats instead.
Welcome back to a Labour Brighton and Hove.
More on our first and second 100 days on my blog here.
More on our manifesto here.
———————————
Warren Morgan is leader of Brighton and Hove council. He tweets @warrenmorgan
———————————