Minutes:
The Council noted a report from the Leader of the Council as follows:
· The Leader wished everyone a happy new year. While it had not been the start to 2021 that many would have liked and it may be some time before life returned to anything near normal, the vaccination programme was now well underway and a wide range of positive work was taking place across the County.
· County Durham and other parts of the north-east had seen increased restrictions introduce following the emergence of a more infectious strain of coronavirus. This resulted in moving from Tier 3 to Tier 4 and then into a national lockdown across England to reduce the infection rate. In December 2020, along with the other LA7 Councils, Durham launched a campaign to thank people for following the rules for so long and to urge everyone to keep going. It followed research commissioned by all 7 Councils that found more than half of north-east residents wanted to comply with social distancing measures but some found this hard and many felt frustrated. Durham was working to support people during this challenging time but it was important to thank everyone for all the efforts they were making.
· At the end of November, the Council launched its Covid Community Champions Scheme which built upon the efforts of the Council and the voluntary and community sector to ensure residents were kept up to date with the latest coronavirus information and guidance. Volunteers were provided with support and training to become trusted voices within their community. The Leader thanked everybody who had volunteered so far to become a Covid Community Champion.
· The Council’s virtual community hub, County Durham Together, continued to support residents who were clinically extremely vulnerable or socially vulnerable, those who were self-isolating and those who needed support to access food and potential supplies. It had also helped those who were isolated or lonely and those who had any concerns linked to coronavirus. The Council had written to all residents identified as clinically extremely vulnerable to make them aware of the help and support that was available.
· Cabinet had agreed to invest a further £5m in helping businesses impacted by the pandemic. The Durham Business Recovery Grant Scheme would provide up to £40,000 in financial assistance to companies across the County to help implement recovery plans to tackle the effects of the pandemic. It would support more than 880 businesses and would have the potential to safeguard 1760 jobs.
· The Council had begun to offer coronavirus vaccinations to front line social care workers through a vaccination hub in the Durham Room at County Hall. The site would also be providing vaccinations for NHS workers and care home staff to help stop the spread of the virus and reduce the pressure on the NHS. Sadly there were some who sought to gain from the current circumstances, with fraudsters using the pandemic to exploit people, businesses and public and private organisations using sophisticated methods to callously scam people out of money. The Leader was pleased to report that the Council’s Corporate Fraud team had helped to prevent 58 attempted frauds since the start of the pandemic with a value of around £3/4m.
· Following the appointment of John Hewitt as Interim Chief Executive, Paul Darby had been appointed as Interim Corporate Director of Resources.
· Although getting together for events and festivals was currently difficult, the Council remained committed to promoting culture in the County. Ahead of the much-anticipated return of Lumiere to Durham later in the year the producers had launched a nationwide commissioning scheme which sought six new works for the event. The Brilliant Scheme was a fantastic opportunity for people to have their work featured at the festival and would help to strengthen Durham’s reputation as a place of culture and creativity.
· Last month the Council was able to support local traders who would have appeared at the popular food and drink festivals in the region through the virtual Durham Festival of Food and Drink. The event included demonstrations from a number of celebrity chefs as well as allowing local businesses to connect with customers both new and old.
· The Council had planted 100 cherry trees at Riverside Park in Chester le Street marking 150 years of friendship between Japan and the UK. As part of the Secure a Cherry Tree project the Council had worked with sponsors NSK to ensure County Durham was included in the national scheme to plant more than 5,000 trees throughout the UK.
· Social care was currently a key priority and staff across the County were working hard to support the most vulnerable residents. In recognition of some of the fantastic work taking place at the end of last year the Health Call Digital Care Home programme achieved success in the national HSJ 2020 Patient Safety Virtual Awards 2020. This was a pioneering piece of digital technology created to allow care providers in County Durham and Darlington to record and share important health check data quickly and easily.
· Aycliffe Secure Centre had received a very positive report following a recent Ofsted inspection demonstrating that it continued to provide outstanding care. The findings from Novembers visit praised staff for building supportive relationships with young people and for being nurturing in their care of young people with complex need.
· The Leader extended congratulations to staff and pupils at Sedgefield Community College which was named the Sunday Times North East Secondary School of the Decade by Parent Power. The newspaper’s schools guide 2021 identified the 2,000 highest achieving schools in the UK ranked by their most recently published examination results.
· A further £10m in funding had been provided to help support young people into education, employment and training across County Durham. The Durham County Council led partnership programme DurhamWorks had been awarded the funding from the European Social Fund to extend its support to young people who were not in education, employment or training or who were at risk of becoming so.
· In December The Council was praised for having one of the top climate response plans in the country for tackling food emissions. A study from the organisation Sustain found that Durham County Council was one of only 13 local authorities in the UK that had outline proposals in its plan to tackle food emissions at an adequate scale. More recently the Council’s Low Carbon Team was named as having the best Climate Action Initiative at this year’s Association for Public Service Excellence Awards which recognised the very best in local government frontline services across the UK.
· The award-winning Climate Action Emergency Response Plan involved schemes such as the on street residential charge point scheme where the Council aimed to build around 100 electric vehicle charge points across the County in the next 15 months. This would enable more residents to make the switch to electric vehicles which would help reduce air pollution and CO2 emissions as well as allowing people to save money on fuel costs. Even in this time of Covid it was important the Council maintained its work on long term challenges such as tackling climate change