AS the door to 2018 opens, I would like to take this chance to highlight our plans, challenges as well as opportunities that lie ahead this year.

Towards the end of last year, the council agreed on a revised set of priorities that underpin our vision to “lead, shape and maintain a prosperous Bury that is fit for the future” within the financial constraints forced upon us, ensuring services are both affordable and sustainable.

The priorities recognise the climate we are working within, which, to be frank, is one of cutbacks following seven years of austerity.

By 2020, Bury Council will have lost £100 million worth of funding since 2010, approximately 70 per cent of the total budget.

This is made all the worse when you consider that Bury is one of the poorest-funded local authorities nationally to start with.

I have been lobbying central government since I have been in post as leader and made a breakthrough last February by securing an extra £7 million worth of funding for social care, but that is a drop in the ocean.

With a growing and ageing population, together with an increase in the number of children that need support, a huge proportion of the council’s resources are used to provide services to some of our most vulnerable residents. To put it in context, last year £74 million was collected in council tax and the council spent £73 million on Adult and Children’s Services.

The Government clearly understands that local councils need more money, but its only answer is to allow councils to increase council tax.

What this means in reality is that the burden is actually shifted on to local tax payers who already pay taxes directly to the Government via their income tax and National Insurance contributions.

We are therefore in between a rock and a hard place.

We desperately need funding to protect local services, but the Government keeps cutting our budgets and expects us to increase local taxes to plug the gap.

Needless to say, this same pressure is felt by public services across the borough, such as the NHS and the police.

We are seeking your views on the financial situation Bury Council must face over the coming years and have opened the Budget Conversation which draws to a close at the end of this month.

I urge you to have your say and help shape our future, and I’ll feed back a summary of your comments received and answers in my February column.

In spite of the challenges, we will not rest on our laurels. You will be hearing me talk a lot this year about the launch of our Growth Plan for Bury.

In a nutshell, it is about how we can create more jobs, better transport links, encourage more businesses to start up in the borough and improve skills and educational attainment for local people.

Despite the challenges, our focus is still on improving opportunities for our residents.

We have already started the ball rolling — for example with the council agreeing to spend £10 million improving our highways, and we recently had an employment and skills event to join up employment opportunities and skills provision locally.

What we are particularly good at in Bury is working together, and that is true across all sectors, from agencies working together to minimise the impact of reducing resources to the way our residents work with their communities to provide the best we can for Bury.

That is down to our fantastic people which I talked about in my review of last year.

We launched a new way of working with our communities through our Neighbourhood Engagement events and following their success plans are in place this year to do more of the same.

We are changing the council’s approach to public services and as we move into this year, will be looking at different ways to work with our residents, so everyone understands what the changes will be and their part in making the new approach work.

The main theme that is going to dominate this year as you see is partnership working.

We have a challenging year ahead but an exciting one too — we are about to start the recruitment process for our permanent chief executive post, and I am looking forward to working with the successful candidate when they start, hopefully in May, to keep Bury at the forefront of conversations across Greater Manchester and indeed within central Government; to ensure we have the best for Bury.

Finally, I encourage you to make the most of opportunities ahead to get involved, and I will keep you updated through this column.

Wishing you a very happy and peaceful New Year.

Cllr Rishi Shori

Leader of Bury Council