Neath Port Talbot Council aims to ensure all local children get the best start in life, residents enjoy long, healthy lives with well paid, green jobs and the area becomes a destination of choice for living, working and leisure.
These ambitious well-being objectives are at the core of the council’s Corporate Plan 2024-2027, Working towards a more prosperous, fairer and greener NPT.
The plan, approved by the council at its meeting on Friday, July 26th, 2024, details the council’s ambitions and the actions now needed to be take with residents, businesses and other partners to achieve them.
However, a report by senior council officials emphasised that, while there are many opportunities, the financial context for the near future is ‘extremely challenging’.
It says:
“Welsh Government has indicated no uplift to the Revenue Support Grant (Government money given to councils to run services) for the next financial year (2025-26). At a time of increasing demand for our services, the 2025-26 budget gap could be around £20m.
“It’s unclear whether the incoming Labour Government will provide any extra funding to Welsh Government to mitigate against this.”
Councillors were reminded that over the last two turbulent financial years – hit by wars in the Middle East and Ukraine, soaring inflation and the effects of Brexit – the council faced extra costs of £70m but got just £26.9m more from the Welsh Government.
The council meeting listened to a directorate-by-directorate explanation of the huge cost pressures currently being faced across sectors including social services, education, housing and many others.
Council Leader, Cllr Steve Hunt said:
“There are now more people than ever seeking help from our social services, more people presenting as homeless and more children needing extra help in school and in travelling to school.
“Tata Steel’s decarbonisation programme that could see the end of traditional steel making at Port Talbot adds a further strategic dimension to this landscape.
“Nevertheless we’ve attracted major projects here with the potential to create large numbers of sustainable jobs including our winning of Freeport status for Port Talbot Docks. By becoming involved in the supply chain for the fast growing Floating Offshore Wind (FLOW) sector, that alone could create many thousands of new, green jobs,
“While there are many challenges in front of us and we continually look at ways of trying to balance our budgets allowing to deliver essential services to our residents, we remain optimistic and ambitious for our county borough.”
The council has established nine ‘transformational programmes’ to achieve its core objectives while noting future budget settlements and grant funding will affect how these progress.
For each well-being objective, the council has set out long term outcomes it wants to achieve,
Objective 1 – All Children get the best start in life…Children and young people will be ambitious, capable learners, enterprising, creative contributors, ethical, informed citizens and healthy, confident individuals.
Objective 2 – All Communities are thriving and sustainable…Inequalities in health, economic and social outcomes will be reduced with people more involved in decisions affect ing them and more involved in community life.
Objective 3 – Our local environment, culture and heritage can be enjoyed by future generations…People will value and cherish our local natural environment and the decline in wildlife will be reversed with our most precious sites improved and connected via green corridors,
Objective 4 – Working with our partners we create conditions for more secure, well paid, green work and will support local people into these jobs…There will be a transformation of major sites at Port Talbot, the Baglan Energy Park and others will provide, significant, new economic benefits which will be delivered through the decarbonisation of industry, housing and transport and the area becomes an exemplar for clean energy use.
