New Peterborough United stadium will benefit city

As part of a Memorandum of Understanding that was signed by the club and the city council this week, potential sites for its new home include the Embankment and other nearby sites in the Local Area Development Framework.

Regular readers of my column will know about our City Centre Development Framework and how we have ambitious plans to provide our city with the retail, leisure and culture that it needs for the next 50 years by attracting inward investment.

Just as a new university will boost our cultural offerings and a transformed train station with better pedestrian access into the city centre will improve our connectivity, a new stadium for the Posh would benefit our whole city.

Our shared vision is to create a new home for Posh that has everything it needs to sustain its playing at a higher level and to work its way through the leagues over the coming years. This new state-of-the-art stadium would also be designed to be used for conferences, concerts, exhibitions and events, which in turn will attract new business, tourism and investment to Peterborough.

Already the club brings in over £7million of revenue to our city each year, boosting our tourism, creating local jobs and improving the health and wellbeing of over 1,000 young people from our communities each week. A new stadium would only increase the benefits for city and residents.

We will now be working closely with the football club to find a suitable location and next steps to achieve this shared aim – watch this space for further updates!

l Last week we published proposals which will allow us to set a balanced budget in the next financial year.

It’s been a tough six months or more getting to this stage, but I am pleased we have a plan to be able to continue providing the services that our residents need with the funding we have available.

But the hard work is not over. Many of the savings and income included in our budget next year are one-offs and won’t deliver ongoing benefits, meaning we will face another uphill climb next year to make further savings.

We cannot continue to operate in this way; we have to find new ways of delivering services with the money that we have available. So, we are carrying out a detailed review of the council and how it is operating, to fundamentally redesign the way we provide services.

At the end of this review, we want to be able to meet our residents’ needs year without the constant need to make savings. In financial terms, we want to be financially sustainable. Alongside that, we will continue to fight Peterborough’s case to Government. Only last week, we had the chance, thanks to our MPs Paul Bristow and Shailesh Vara, to meet with the Minister for Local Government and Homelessness, Luke Hall, where we were given more than an hour, much longer than is usually allowed, to explain our city, its challenges, how well our services perform and to put a strong case forward for fairer funding. We also gained some knowledge about how Government will approach fairer funding and how we should pitch our case.

We will continue to bang the drum for Peterborough and look for new ways of working until we reach a time when our council can stand on its own two feet.

l Finally, well done to all those who received their Key Stage Four results last week, which show steady progress is being made in raising the attainment of our city secondary schools.

As well as the endless hours of revision and dedication applied by the pupils themselves, our education team has worked flat out this year to brainstorm, research and implement changes to help schools and academies close the gap between our current grades and the national average. There’s still a way to go, but these latest results demonstrate that our approach is right and is achieving real results.