The Mayor invited the Leader of the Council, Councillor Gledhill, to introduce the budget and advised that he had 20 minutes to do so.

Thank you Mr Mayor

This is the second Conservative budget I have delivered and how much has changed in those two years. As you know in 2016 we inherited a budget with a £4m pressure, a budget with no street cleaners, no environmental enforcement officers, little or no equipment to cut the grass, no coherent assets list, no plans to make our assets work for our residents and worse than a letter saying there was absolutely no money left we had a so called graph of doom which was rolled out on every single occasion to show how bad things were going to become. In 2016 we started to reverse this poor administration of these public services, putting council tax payer’s money back to where they wanted to see it, back into the services what they expected the council to provide. That was cleaning the streets, cutting the grass and filling the potholes. And of course all the other services that we provide. Looking after the elderly, young and most vulnerable, supply educational support, regeneration of the borough, collecting council tax the list goes on and on. At the end of last year we closed the year with a small surplus which increased the reserves, we made headway onto the 6 years of neglect this borough had suffered with our clean it cut it fill campaign, we set a budget that we were told would not be deliverable. During the year we set investment principles which were agreed by every councillor here this evening to ensure openness when we made large investments and in doing so we achieved something that every single member outside of the conservative group said we would not, we balanced the budget at year end. Not only did we balance the budget we put £5.5million extra into reserves but because of our investment strategy we also had a surplus, a one off surplus, of £2.3million. Not money taken from the hard pressed tax payer but money we had got from our ability to invest wisely and get income from those investments. A surplus this year being used to improve the ability of our grounds maintenance team to do their job throughout the year, extra money for road surfacing and more importantly more money, and new money going into tackling anti-social behaviour across our borough. So in 22 months what we have done we have turned that ridiculous graph of doom upside down into the graph of BOOM. As I would hope every member in this room would know we are a unitary authority so we have responsibility for services both County Councils and District Councils supply combined. However, we still manage to do this with the lowest Council Tax in Essex, the third lowest of all unitary authorities like Thurrock and indeed one of the lowest in the Country. Now this had  ...  view the full minutes text for item 129