DELIVERING FOR HERTFORDSHIRE – Your Conservative County Council’s achievements
Social Care:
- Raising care worker pay above the living wage for residential, nursing and supported living establishments, across disability and older people’s services, no one should earn less than £9.50 per hour.
- Investing in safeguarding in adult social care by providing essential social care services to more than 25,000 adults each year, including more than 3,500 with learning disabilities. We also support more than 32,000 family carers.
- Meals on Wheels has been lost from many Council areas, not in Hertfordshire, we spend a million pounds a year with social enterprise charity HILS, delivering care, wellbeing and half a million hot meals.
- We beefed up helplines, advice available every day. Thank you HertsHelp.
Our Community:
- Supporting the Voluntary Sector, including and additional £2m for an enhanced package in 2021/22 to support COVID recovery.
- Providing permanent funding for the Domestic Violence Service.
- Every Councillor was given an extra £5000 for Covid Community Support, £15000 in total for a great local impact.
Covid Pandemic
- Hertfordshire Voluntary sector stepped up to the plate and with our help delivered care, education, transport, a friendly call and hot nutritious meals in record numbers.
- Hertfordshire’s 6500 volunteers are magnificent and together we helped 42,000 shielded residents with 6000 daily meals, medicines, care, nappies and pet food. Over 120,000 food parcels delivered in the first peak alone.
Climate change and the environment
- £10m as part of our Climate Change response, to improve drainage in response to highways flooding brought about by increasing and changing rainfall patterns.
- £12m to drive forward delivery of the Sustainable Hertfordshire strategy including our commitment to climate change.
- The newly redeveloped Ware Recycling Centre officially opened on Saturday 31 October. The first of its kind in Hertfordshire, the new ‘supersite’ is four times larger than its predecessor and has been designed to handle up to 300,000 visits and up to 10,000 tonnes of waste a year.
- We fund the treatment of about 545,000 tonnes of waste generated each year.
- We have saved 25% energy in the past 10 years.
- We have planted 20,575 trees on land within Hertfordshire County Council’s ownership
Safer streets, highways and transport
- We have allocated £7m over 4 years for the roll out of 20 mph speed limits and developed a strategy with partners to make this easier to deliver.
- We have allocated £3m of investment in walking and cycling schemes
- Investing £9m in bus priority measures, developing on demand services in the rural areas and through our 'enhanced partnership' with bus operators developing plans to improve bus services across the county.
- Our enhanced transport partnership has been adopted by government in their latest Bus Strategy.
- Converted all our streetlights to energy saving LED.
- Maintaining 3,200 miles of roads; carrying out more than 1,500 maintenance and improvement and fixing more than 18,000 potholes per year.
Children and Young People
- £53m of investment in new Special Schools and specialist resource provision to enable delivery of the SEND strategy approved by Cabinet in December 2020.
- Investment in prevention and early help, supporting diversion work that aims to avoid children becoming looked after.
- Keeping our 80 Family Centres open to provide support for families.
- National acknowledgement for our Family Safeguarding - Isabelle Trowler chief social worker in 2017 said;” I think Hertfordshire may be our national treasure” when we rolled out Family Safeguarding model. Our service won the National Public Service award, overall winner.
- Over the last 2 years we have supported the provision of 878 additional primary places and 1,182 secondary places at a cost of £35.1m.
- We have invested £6.9m in improving SEND provision, including the creation of an additional 233 special school places.
Public Health and Wellbeing
- We have the largest Health Walks project in the Country, with 300 amazing volunteers leading 70,000 walks a year.
- More than 114,000 health checks have been delivered over the past five years and we have helped more than 16,000 people to stop smoking.
- There were more than 1 million downloads from our libraries in 2020 including eBooks, eAudiobooks, digital newspapers and digital magazines.
Growth, Infrastructure and The Economy
- Creating a £2m investment fund to support driving forward Growth and Infrastructure work in the county. £125m raised from development being spent to improve everyone’s neighbourhood.
- Working closely with business our plans are laid for creating 100,000 new jobs by 2031. Our £2m investment fund supports growth and infrastructure.
Fire and Rescue Service
- Delivering against the 2019-23 Integrated Risk Management Plan (IRMP) so that appropriate Fire Prevention, Protection and Response resources are provided.
- Responding to more than 10,000 emergencies each year and carrying out Safe and Well visits in around 3,500 homes
People
