Plymouth City Council is well ahead of target in delivering its 100 pledges for a Plymouth to be proud of.
A report to Cabinet says six more pledges have recently been delivered, bringing the total to 60.
The 100 pledges launched in May 2018 focus council activities on key themes that matter most to Plymouth residents, including jobs and prosperity, keeping Plymouth on the move, supporting children and young people, better health and adult social care, fighting poverty, enhancing the city centre and creating a cleaner, greener city.
The pledges are due to be completed over four years but are already ahead of schedule.
The latest pledges to be delivered include:
- Supporting local businesses by reviewing the Council’s procurement procedures to make sure it buys as much as it can locally
- Working with the NHS to expand the support available to schools and young people to tackle the crisis in mental health
- Promoting increased social interaction between generations by helping schools and child care providers to forge links with residential homes, community centres and senior citizen’s clubs
- Working with child and adult care providers, charities and others to examine the feasibility of intergenerational care facilities and bring support for older and younger people together on the same site
- Calling a Health and Social Care summit to strengthen the NHS and social care system, and address gaps in provision in our city.
- Supporting the campaign to ensure women born in the 1950s are not unfairly hit by pension changes.
There has been particularly strong progress in delivering pledges to help create a cleaner greener city.
To achieve this the Council has raised its ambitions for Plymouth to do everything it can to address climate change having moved the pledge for the city to become a carbon neutral city by 2050 forward to 2030.
To help achieve this, it has been delivering a wide range of initiatives, including installing energy efficient features in hundreds of homes, as well as solar installations in more than 30 schools and community buildings and drilling in the city centre to see if hot rock could help heat offices and regeneration projects, reducing dependence on fossil fuels.
The Council’s Plymotion team is encouraging people to try cleaner, cheaper and healthier travel and there has been investment in more bus lanes and cycle routes so people can leave their cars at home. More electric vehicle charging points are also being installed around the city.
Nobody likes dog mess but a minority of irresponsible dog owners ruin things for everyone else. The Council is delivering its pledge to take a zero tolerance approach to tackling irresponsible dog owners who do not pick up and has run a campaign to warn people of the penalties they face to leaving dog mess. A number of people have received fines.
On a more pleasant note, the Council has delivered its pledge to introduce bee corridors and wild flower meadows to help bees and butterfly populations to thrive and is planning to continue to expand these habitats across the city.
It is also delivering its pledge to tackle the backlog in tree maintenance across the city, listening to residents’ views and concerns. It is delivering a focused programme of winter tree works and have made additional resources available to target outstanding tree work.
Strong progress has also been made in delivering our pledges to keep Plymouth on the move. For example, it has delivered a programme to tackle blocked drains, improved the reliability of real time bus information and accelerated a programme of pavement repairs and road improvement to get rid of the worst potholes
Councillor Mark Lowry, Cabinet member for Finance, said: “We knew that having 100 pledges for a Plymouth to be proud of was ambitious but delivering 60 within this timescale shows just how serious we are about this. We are well on track to deliver the remaining pledges but work doesn’t stop each time we complete one – we continue to treat each of them as a priority. We’re making sure that we further progress the priorities that are based on what Plymouth residents have told us are important to them.”
For a full list of all the pledges visit our pledges page.