The Local Democracy reporter Abigail Marshall recently caught up with Cllr Carole Pattison about the latest developments at the local authority.
Cllr Pattison, took over as Leader in July last year, and vowed Kirklees Council would become a more honest, transparent and open authority.
She took over as Leader in July last year, and vowed to turn Kirklees Council would become a more honest, transparent and open authority.
Six months on and weeks away from a whole council meeting to agree the final annual budget, and Cllr Carole Pattison says it’s all about getting “back to basics” and focusing on what people need most.
“We’ve had to have a really good look at everything that we do, right across the council and make sure that it is provided in the most efficient way and the best way that responds to the needs of our residents – not necessarily the organisation and how that feels – but what the people out there need,” she said.
“That’s what my ‘back to basics’ is really all about, because the more that we get right and do properly in terms of providing our services, the more that those services will be provided well and people won’t necessarily feel that we’ve trimmed a little bit of fat.”
The council’s annual budget will be published on 3 February, 2025 for consideration by the authority’s Cabinet with a final annual budget set to be agreed at a meeting of all Kirklees councillors on 5 March, 2025. So with the key dates fast approaching, we sat down with Cllr Pattison to discuss this and other recent developments at the local authority.
It’s been a tough few years for the council as far as finances are concerned, with a £47m shortfall in 2023/24 marking a particularly difficult point, when effective bankruptcy was a very real threat. While this may no longer be the case, the year has seen service cuts, closures and price increases as pressures linger on.
Elsewhere, there have been more popular developments as some of the borough’s most significant regeneration projects have taken major steps forward. Some of the more controversial cost-cutting proposals have been axed or softened, with plans to roll out car parking fees less severe as first envisaged, and plans to slash the size of grey bins and make some libraries community-run scrapped altogether.
Image: LDRS
With all of this still fresh in the minds of many, we wanted to know how Cllr Pattison and her administration intend to restore the public’s faith and provide reassurance that things are moving in the right direction. The councillor came into post as Leader in July, taking over from Labour-turned Independent, Cllr Cathy Scott (Community Alliance, Dewsbury East).
Councillor Pattison said: “The cuts that we have had to make and follow through with are from previous budgets that have been hard and have affected people. Since I became the leader, I have tried to soften the blow on some of those as much as possible, like the parking charges.
“Unfortunately, we weren’t able to save Dewsbury Leisure Centre but we have looked at other buildings – our libraries for instance, we have been able to keep those going. We’ve looked at better ways of providing those services again with the resource that we have, so we have tried to soften the blow.
“How can I restore their faith? I’d say it’s only by our actions, by what I’ve already done and what I will continue to do to make sure that what we do is for our residents’ benefit as much as possible and that the cuts we have to make don’t affect them badly in any shape or form and that where possible we are putting things back into place.”
The councillor shared her optimism that the current government will help this to become a reality through better funding. She said: “We have been able to secure more money from them in the October settlement but also, we’re hoping that there will be a better settlement come April when they’re looking towards giving us a three-year settlement.”
In terms of the administration’s priorities at this moment in time, Cllr Pattison summed these up as: protecting the vulnerable; getting the basics right; and enabling economic growth.
Kirklees Council’s budget will be finalised at a meeting of all councillors in March 2025, setting out the local authority’s spending plans for the year ahead. Though some financial difficulties remain, with the local authority projecting a £29.3m budget gap going into 2025/26, Cllr Pattison says there are no “big ticket items” in the upcoming budget proposals that will impact residents’ day-to-day lives.
She said: “There shouldn’t be anything that people suddenly notice isn’t there anymore but that doesn’t mean that we aren’t tightening our belt and trimming off a bit of fat there and being a bit more efficient with our resources somewhere else.
“But that’s what my ‘back to basics’ is really all about, because the more that we get right and do properly in terms of providing our services, the more that those services will be provided well and people won’t necessarily feel that we’ve trimmed a little bit of fat.
“We’ve had to have a really good look at everything that we do, right across the council, and make sure that it is provided in the most efficient way and the best way that responds to the needs of our residents – not necessarily the organisation and how that feels – but what the people out there need.”
The majority of councillors will need to agree on the budget for it to be passed, which could be tough given the local authority’s political makeup, being run by Labour as a minority administration, with the presence of five other political groups and several independent members.
Councillor Pattison said that it will ultimately come down to negotiations and that she is ‘open and willing’ to negotiate with other elected members over what should feature in the budget.
With several members of the opposition from the Greens, Lib Dems, along with some independent councillors, recently launching a campaign in the hopes of bringing in a committee system – where all elected members would play a greater role in the decision-making process – we asked Cllr Pattison what her thoughts were on this recent news.
She said: “I am concerned that that’s distracting at this particular time because we have got bigger things to worry about and we have got these services to keep on the road. We do want to make sure that the council is in a fit state to be able to provide those services for the public of Kirklees.
“If changing those arrangements means it’s more costly, or it’s more time consuming, or it uses more resources, then all of that is distracting and takes away from what we can actually provide to residents, so that’s my concern at the moment.”
We asked Cllr Pattison whether she agreed that a committee system would be ‘fairer’ than the council’s existing Cabinet model, as it has been described by some. She said: “I don’t think any other way of arranging it would be any more necessarily open or honest or certainly, there’d be nothing fairer about it.
“All members have the opportunity to participate in all of our meetings where decisions are made so there isn’t a suggestion really, that it’s unfair at the moment – nobody’s kept out of the room or anything like that. We haven’t got decisions going on behind closed doors.”
The councillor re-emphasised her pledge to lead the council in a more “open and transparent” way upon being elected as Leader, giving the recent budget consultation, cross-party meetings, the use of scrutiny panels and the administration ‘not shying away’ from answering questions at Council and Cabinet meetings, as examples for how this has been done. She said: “We’re as open and honest as possible and transparent in all our dealings, both with members and with the public. I believe, because people have told me so, that they can see that difference, that the administration that I’m leading has made a difference to the way we are perceived as councillors or what we’re doing as councillors and how that is perceived.”
In terms of regeneration, Cllr Pattison spoke of the strides various projects are making across the district from the Dewsbury and Batley Blueprints and Holmfirth Town Centre Access Plan to Huddersfield’s Cultural Heart. For the latter, given changes and cutbacks have been made in some areas, we wanted to know whether the final result will be as expected.
Councillor Pattison said: “Whatever changes we make will still be designed to improve the visitor experience to Kirklees and Huddersfield. That is still the priority and that will still happen and it might look slightly different but it will still provide the same experience and that’s what we’ve got to do in the end – provide the same visitor experience.
“In many ways, the more we look at it, the more it’s going to be even better than we thought. Things like what is going into the new library, new museum, new art gallery – when we first saw all those plans they were buildings and that’s all we saw but now we can see what’s actually going to happen inside them and that’s all much more exciting than necessarily the actual buildings, and that will be as good as expected.”
