Community
We are launching a £2 Growth and Infrastructure Fund in early 2022, which will provide funding into the heart of our communities to support delivery of new infrastructure.
Supporting People
The Council works hard to support people facing difficulties in their lives that may cause them to become homeless. The approach of our staff is to try to find people that may be at risk as early as possible, and support them to tackle all the issues they are facing. These can be very long-standing issues so our approach is to work intensively with people for as long as is needed to really try to help them for the long term.
Our Community Bus can be regularly seen out and about in our towns and villages, taking the service out to our communities to make it as easily accessible as possible. The team can help people with financial and debt advice, mental health issues, housing advice, consumer and benefits advice.
We are proud of our team which is doing a great job and we are proud that the District has very low levels of homelessness.
Supporting Health Services
We have championed improved health services across the District. This is not in the direct remit of the District Council, but we have provided strategic and financial support to health providers to help improve various facilities in the District to support our growing population. This includes championing the redevelopment of the Princess of Wales Hospital in Ely which has now been granted planning permission; we are committed to contributing financially to this vital project for East Cambridgeshire residents.
The vision for our new Hospital is for a modern hub – all existing services retained, comprehensive GP and pharmacy services, new diagnostic services, additional day surgeries and a new full Local Urgent Care Service.
Supporting and Delivering Sport and Leisure Facilities
We need more and better sports and leisure opportunities and facilities throughout the district and we have added a new item to our Community Infrastructure Levy (CIL) list to allow people to bid for funds to provide new facilities and upgrade existing ones.
We provide grants to our leisure centres to help with ongoing running costs and in our 2022 budget we have made a capital fund available to support capital improvement projects. We also make further money available for capital improvements and new sports and leisure facilities via the Community Infrastructure Levy (CIL) funds.
We have delivered a new district swimming pool and leisure centre, The Hive, which forms part of the popular Ely Leisure Village.
We have financially supported the fantastic project to redevelop Soham Mill in Soham which is now a thriving community facility for exciting and engaging arts, cultural and heritage educational opportunities.
Improvements to our Market Towns
Flood Resilience
The District Council does not have responsibility for flood management – that responsibility rests with the County Council and the Environment Agency. However, we know this subject is of concern to local residents and we are working with our Parish Councils and Internal Drainage Boards (IDBs) to improve flood resilience and to work with the other agencies to get improvements and to hold them to account. We are also making money available to increase system capacity in our IDB infrastructure for better water management and flood prevention.
