Leaders urge officers to give them more input in work to set up Cumberland Council

Councillors who will form the leadership of the new Cumberland Council have asked officers to give them more input in the work to set up the new authority.

Cumberland Council’s executive met for the second time on Wednesday, making decisions to prepare for Vesting Day – April 1 2023, when they takeover from the existing city and borough councils and Cumbria County Council.

And leading members of Carlisle, Allerdale and Copeland’s new council raised concerns about their involvement in the council restructure.

Leader of the new authority Cllr Mark Fryer said that the LGR process is seeing “the absolutely unbelievable situation where one of my executive members has had a meeting cancelled on her three times.

“That’s got to stop if we’re to deliver this council by April next year, people need to step up.”

However, he added: “people on the coal face are working their socks off.”

Concerns were also raised about the tight timescale to produce Cumberland’s draft financial plan by October.

During a discussion on the council’s financial plan, Cllr Barbara Cannon said: “For me, I think this is the single most important thing we have to sort out quickly and I too am concerned about that October deadline.

“I have said I’d like to be present at the meeting (with chief financial officers) to have these discussions because I still can’t quite get my head round, the fact that I’ve been elected like the rest of you in May and we still haven’t got the chance to talk to the people that are putting this stuff together.”

The interim chief executive, Andrew Seekings, gave a report on the LGR process in the last item of the meeting.

And statutory deputy leader Lisa Brown said: “This programme is designed as one to happen in the background, now there was an election in May and that hasn’t been taken into account.

“So, you’ve got executive members around the table, you’ve got other members in different political parties who were elected to something they thought was going to happen, and you’ve done your best to put training programmes on, that’s been great but we’ve always just been an afterthought.”