Essex County Council and Braintree District Council set their budgets last week. This has been a challenging process in recent years, made more so this year due to the financial impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic.

At Essex County Council (ECC) there were welcome announcements, including £1million investment in mental health support for children and the health and care workforce.

After years of requests from opposition councillors, including Greens and Independents, the Conservative ECC administration has agreed to restore the funding to Local Highways Panels (LHP) that was cut some years ago.

There will be £200,000 more for each panel per year, plus an additional £180,000 added to LHP revenue budgets for smaller highways projects.

The Braintree District LHP has a scheme list that would have taken about six years to fund at the budget levels we had prior to this announcement.

With this newly-restored budget, many more projects can be progressed, such as road safety schemes, new pedestrian crossings, lower speed limits and investment in walking and cycling.

The ECC Essex Forest Initiative aims to plant 375,000 trees over five years. Green and Independent councillors at BDC urged the council as part of its budget decision to fund a similar initiative in Braintree district, including planting new community woodlands, which would have public access and would be planted in co-operation with local communities. We believe these would be very popular and could attract volunteers to help plant them.

The G&I Group at BDC proposed £250,000 for new community woodlands, to be funded from unallocated capital funding. This would have had no impact on council tax. 

To our surprise the Conservatives - backed by Labour councillors - voted down the community woodlands proposal. As with their previous rejection of our proposal for four new cycling routes connecting villages and towns, we were told they “have a better plan”.

Time will tell if that is the case, but in the meantime we feel an opportunity has been missed to be ambitious for the future - to create new community woodlands which would be good for people, the climate and wildlife.

James Abbott
Green Party Essex County Councillor for Witham Northern division
and District Councillor for Silver End and Cressing
Park Road, Rivenhall