Statement from Councillor Paul Peacock

Something that always strikes me as quite remarkable is that residents benefit from a huge range of services from us, some of which I’ll talk about shortly, for £3.74 per week per household on average. I really am proud of the services that we deliver and of the fantastic workforce that we have.

Last year Newark and Sherwood District Council collected almost 4 million bins and this will increase this year as more people are signing up to receive our free kerbside glass service or subscribing to our garden waste collection service.  We employ a team of 85 operatives who head out every single day, come rain, shine, snow or gales to ensure bins are emptied and your streets are clean; I’d like to once again thank them for their commitment to Newark and Sherwood. In 2025 we’ll start the groundwork for being able to introduce a free food waste collection service by 2027 too.

We currently cut over 2 million square meters of grass every fortnight, we keep our district’s streets clean, and we look after millions of plants, trees, flora and fauna. We empty over 60,000 litter and dog bins per year, have given away 1,200 trees over the last year and planted nearly 900 more. Over the next year we are looking forward to doing even more to support our environment, recycling more and reducing the district’s carbon footprint in our bid to achieve our carbon-net zero goal in 2035.

We keep residents safe through our food standard and health and safety inspections on restaurants and cafés, we provide good quality and affordable homes to more than 5,500 tenants, and we support residents fleeing from domestic violence or who face homelessness. And we’ll continue to do this and more through 2025.

In addition, we have supported hundreds of residents to ensure they get the help they need through welfare and benefit advice. We’ve secured millions of pounds in additional funding to support our town centres and, this year, work will begin on huge development projects in Ollerton, Clipstone, and Newark.

We’ve invested in supporting our local businesses and high streets. We organise and hold free training sessions and events for local businesses to help them grow. We support our business tenants throughout the district across a range of work areas including retail, office space and industrial, helping them to thrive.  We know that high streets across the UK are struggling and we have intervened recently in bringing new life to abandoned buildings. We are determined to support a future for High Street businesses and 2025 will bring great progress with projects in Newark and Ollerton High Streets.

Our dedicated team of Public Protection Officers support police colleagues, ensuring we are doing all we can to tackle crime and anti-social behaviour. We also work closely with the NHS to increase health and wellbeing activities and services to those residents who need them the most. 

Our website is the go-to place to report something to us so we can resolve it quickly and efficiently. If your bin collection is missed, a dog waste bin in a park is full, you spot a fly-tip or anything similar, let us know and our street scene team will be on the case immediately. We are only a phone call away, so if you are a business and you want to talk to us about rate relief, our business support hubs or anything, get in touch. If you are a tenant and want to talk about your home, get in touch. If you are a resident and can’t get online, give us a call too. We receive over 140,000 phone calls per year, help over 19,000 residents face to face and action over 20,000 reports via our website. If you report something to us, we will deal with it, so please do let us know.

All this and more for around £3.74 per week, quite remarkable.

Thank you to our dedicated workforce for all that they do. Thank you to our residents for supporting our teams. And to you all, I wish you a Happy New Year.