STROUD District Council leader Geoff Wheeler keeps you up to date with what is happening at the council

SATURDAY, November 14 – Berkeley Green Open Day

SGS College opened the doors to its new campus on the site of the former nuclear laboratories.

It gave potential students the chance to find out more about the new engineering, construction and digital technology opportunities, which will be available from September next year, and to view plans for the future Green Skills Centre due to be developed over the next five years.

The centre will cover education, training, business start-up and research facilities and the development of science, technology, engineering and mathematics.

It was particularly interesting to visit my former place of work, where I was a research engineer.

It actually turned into an impromptu mini-reunion as I bumped into a few former colleagues.

Thursday, November 19 – extraordinary council meeting, 7pm, Ebley Mill

I mentioned last week that this meeting was convened so that the council could vote on the Stroud District Local Plan, which was recently approved by the Planning Inspectorate. Councillors voted to adopt it and it came into force immediately.

From a process perspective there is a six-week window for anyone to lodge an appeal but bearing in mind the feedback from the planning inspector, any such challenge would be unlikely to succeed.

We’re now the first council in Gloucestershire to have an up-to-date local plan in place and it will allow us to strategically plan where development should take place rather than fight off speculative applications where it shouldn’t.

A tremendous amount of work has gone into it,s production – particularly from council planners - so I’d like to thank everyone who contributed to this hugely important plan which will shape the district for decades to come.

You can view the plan at stroud.gov.uk/localplan.

Wednesday, January 25 – Spending Review

Today is a big day for the public sector as local government and central government departments await the announcements from the chancellor of the exchequer in his spending review.

It will set out budgets for the next few years.

So far, thanks to some very sound financial management and planning over the past decade or so, SDCouncil has not had to take some of the tough decisions that many other authorities have had to.

Over the next few weeks we’ll hear more detail and be able to crunch the numbers properly.

Whatever impact, we’ll continue to look at all of the options that allow us to keep services running as they should.