Leader's and Deputy Leader's Announcements
To receive such announcements as may be made by the Leader and Deputy Leader.
Minutes:
The Leader, in summary:
1 reported that he had taken on a new role as the Local Government Association representative at the Centre for Goverance and Scrutiny. He commended their work to Members, particularly the 10 Questions Guides which covered a range of topics such as cybersecurity, climate change and looked after children.
2 reported that the Ofsted Inspection had commenced on Monday 26 February and that the inspectors would be with the Council until Friday 8 March.
3 referred to climate change and the Council’s commitment to being carbon neutral by 2025 and highlighted the progress made towards the target, with the solar farm under construction, over 50,000 trees planted on council land, use of heat source pumps in Macclesfield Town Hall and the use of low energy light bulbs in street lighting. These were all saving money as well as reducing carbon emission. He stated that it was a measure of the severity of the financial challenges faced by the Council that he has agreed that the target date be put back to 2027.
4 referred to the garden waste permit scheme and that the take up was exceeding expectations with nearly 70,000 households signed up.
5 referred to cybersecurity and an article in the LGA First magazine on the lessons learnt from the Gloucester City Council attached. The initial breach of security had been a single spear phishing email that had been inserted into an existing email chain with a supplier. Since reading the article he had been wary of using his private email address to any Council email address and asked people to be wary of any email purporting to be from him which was not from his official email address. He asked if anybody clicked on a link that did not responds as expected to report this, as there were 2.7m attempted cyber-attacks on councils in 2022 and 90% of successful attacks were due to human error and that phishing was the most common form of attach.
The Deputy Leader, in summary:
1 reported that on the 4 March, the Council would be hosting both the Mayor of Manchester, Andy Burnham and the Mayor of Liverpool, Steve Rotheram, alongside local and regional businesses, and political leaders at an event at Crewe Market Hall to demonstrate the importance of Crewe for the future of rail and the economic ambitions of the North West. He stated that with HS2 cancelled, it was more important than ever that the right level of investment at Crewe station and connectivity to/from and through Crewe was at the heart of current and future discussions about investment in the rail network north of Birmingham. A selection of representatives of the local business community had been invited to the event where they would have the opportunity to raise questions and highlight how the cancellation of HS2 was impacting business confidence and investment decisions in Crewe and the asks that are needed of Government to remedy this.
2 reported that work had ... view the full minutes text for item 70