From our District Councillor
Happy New Year. I hope you and your families had a happy and relaxing Christmas
holiday.
One of my New Year Resolutions is to try to get fit. East Cambs has joined with SportsDeC to provide an online sports club directory. The site, at www.sportsdec.org.uk, provides a comprehensive list of local sports clubs and information on the range and whereabouts of the sporting opportunities in or around East Cambs. The new user friendly website has been created by the Council's Leisure and Tourism Services department to ensure as many people as possible have access to information about sporting opportunities within the district. The secondary aim of developing this site is to start working towards the governments' objective of ensuring that 70% of the population is reasonably active by the year 2020.
The Government issued its provisional Revenue Support Grant (RSG) projections for 2004/05 in November. From the information supplied it seemed East Cambs would get almost £300,000 less to fund our services than we had budgeted for (equal to about 12% on East Cambs' share of your Council tax). But in December the Chancellor used his interim budget statement to announce a further £340 million for Local Government. East Cambs will get £143,000 of this. But we are still short of what we were budgeting for. And it is short of what the Government agrees they should be giving us, by £311,000. This is because although they agree that we need more money, they will not increase the total given to all local authorities. If we were to get everything we need straight away other authorities would have to have a cut in their grant. So our increase is to be phased in over an unspecified time. In the meantime we have to struggle to balance our budget. During January we will be consulting on the options, and we will decide our budget, and therefore the district's share of your Council Tax in February.
Last year we ran a course called "How to Come up With an Idea for a Business". It was so popular that we will run some more on the 22nd and 23rd January, 1st and 2nd April and 8th and 9th July. Several of the people who went on the course have joined together to form a Business Start-Up Club to provide members with the opportunity to keep in contact with others who share an interest in starting a business and to give each other encouragement and mutual support. If you are interested in attending one of these courses, or joining the Business Start-Up Club, please contact Darren Hill on 01353 616387.