Plymouth City Council is fighting for the fishing industry’s future with its successful Call 4 Fish initiative and a call to Government to do more to help a sector on the brink of collapse.
The Council has today written to the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs to lobby for urgent additional support for fishing.
Earlier this week, the Government released new guidance on Free School Meals and launched a national food voucher scheme.
It means that children eligible for free school meals can benefit from a national voucher scheme allowing them to continue to access meals whilst they stay at home.
Schools can now choose to provide every eligible child with a weekly shopping voucher worth £15 (£3 per day) to spend at supermarkets while schools are closed due to coronavirus.
The Caring for Plymouth Support Hub – the operation to shield Plymouth’s most vulnerable residents from the coronavirus – is up and running.
Plymouth City Council’s Cabinet Member for Children and Young People has joined forces (virtually) with the Youth Parliament Members to send messages to Plymouth’s Young People.
27 March 2020
Dear Parents,
I am the councillor in Plymouth responsible for education. I wanted to write to you about the challenges that many of us are likely to face in the coming weeks and months as we try to balance home working with home educating our children.
A small army of community volunteers is assembling, ready to help Plymouth’s most vulnerable through the coronavirus outbreak.
We are doing everything we can to support Plymouth through the COVID-19 pandemic and respond to the rapidly changing national effort to prevent it spreading.
Our priorities include preserving life and limiting harm to the people of Plymouth, keep all key services running as long as possible whilst minimising risk to staff and residents and supporting the local economy .
We are using our established plans for managing a major incident and our pandemic plan to co-ordinate our response, working closely with partner agencies in the city, as well as regionally and nationally.
Council car parks are curerntly free to use as part of our efforts to rsupport the emergency services, the NHS, care workers and key workers who are keeping our city’s residents safe.
Parking charges are suspended in Council car parks but the focus will be on making sure those providing essential services are safe, which is why we will continue to enforce yellow lines, footway parking, disabled parking bays, business bays and doctors/emergency bays.
Plymouth’s businesses will now be able to apply for financial support to help get them through the current uncertainties created by the Covid-19 pandemic.
Plymouth City Council is writing to all businesses eligible to receive grants so they can urgently access financial help as soon as possible - with the ambition of making most payments within the next two weeks.
The Small Business Grants Fund, announced by the Government last week as part of a £330 billion package of support, offers a one-off grant to a number of businesses:
The Government announced on 23 March new measures that require everyone to stay at home, except in a limited number of circumstances. This followed the requirement for businesses and other venues to close introduced on 20 March.
The measures are detailed in full below:
The single most important action we can all take, in fighting coronavirus, is to stay at home in order to protect the NHS and save lives.