Praise for Northumberland's handling of the pandemic

The comments came as the county council’s corporate services committee discussed both the Covid-19 response and recovery plans at its meeting on Monday, July 13.

These had previously been discussed by the cabinet in June, where the administration set out a six-point pledge for its ‘number one priority for Covid-19 recovery’, which is ‘to get our economy back on track’.

At the latest meeting, Cllr Nick Oliver, the Conservative cabinet member for corporate services, said: “I think this crisis has highlighted the importance of local government and how councils touch on all of our daily lives.”

Later on, Labour’s Cllr Ian Swithenbank said that it was a case of ‘well done local government nationally’ at a time when it can sometimes feel when the sector ‘has very few friends’.

“No other structure had the bodies on the ground to deal with this,” he said. “Without local government, the Government’s response to Covid-19 would have been limited.

“Overall, I think Northumberland has a lot to be proud of, I’m not going to criticise because it was new ground for everyone.”

The financial repercussions of the pandemic were also discussed at the meeting, with Cllr Lynne Grimshaw, the Labour committee vice-chairman, asking how the impacts of Covid-19 may affect the council’s finances in relation to having to dip in reserves, row back on capital spending or sell assets.

Cllr Oliver said: “The capital works programme will be kept under constant review.

“Fortunately, the council’s finances were in a fairly good state before this, so we don’t think this is going to be a doomsday scenario.

“The speed of the recovery will affect what we can do; at the moment, we see the capital spending programme as a really important way of supporting the economy.”

This was in line with what council leader said in an interview with the Local Democracy Reporting Service in June.

He was bullish that economic recovery efforts won’t have a knock-on impact on other projects and spending across the county, saying that as many of the administration’s plans relate to ‘ambitious infrastructure projects’, ‘we will only accelerate them, we will not put anything off at all’.

In late June, the council was predicting a £12million shortfall in its 2020-21 budget due to coronavirus, over and above the additional £19.1million it has already received from the Government.

Since then, however, the Local Government Secretary announced another pot of £500million would be handed out to local authorities – with Northumberland’s share not known yet – alongside a scheme to cover a proportion of councils’ lost income.

Using non-recurrent reserves ‘is a means of last resort’, the council has said.

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