Ambitious Ashfield Council celebrates 2024 achievements
At Cabinet on 20 January, members discussed the Council’s accomplishments over the past year as it continues to move from ‘Good’ to ‘Great’ in 2025.
The Council’s ambitious Corporate Plan clearly identifies priorities over four years from 2023-27 and has seen some key milestones reached in 2024.
ADC’s Corporate plan includes six key priority areas:
- Health and Happiness - to enable everyone to live healthier and happier lives, to prosper in their communities and remain independent throughout life.
- Homes and Housing – to ensure everyone has access to a suitable and appropriate home.
- Economic Growth and Place - to drive local growth through innovation via skills and employment, businesses and investment, regeneration, visitor economy, arts and culture, infrastructure and connectivity and towns centres and high streets.
- Cleaner and Greener - to focus on having green spaces to be proud of, keeping Ashfield clean and decarbonising our social housing.
- Safer and Stronger - to provide a safer Ashfield where residents, businesses and visitors feel safer in the District.
- Innovate and Improve - to be innovative and customer focussed, building pride in the area.
In 2024, the Council reached significant milestones in each of these priority areas, with highlights including:
- Health and Happiness
- Increasing the number of attendances at the Council’s Leisure Centres between April and September 2024 by nearly 82,000 (870,000 – a 10% increase) compared to attendances over the same period 2023/24 and nearly 50% increase since 2021/2022.
- Supporting 18 local groups with a grant, totalling £20,350 as part of the UKSPF Green Social Prescribing and Walking/Cycling Fund.
- Working with the Football Foundation to install 5 Playzones in the District.
- Securing a development grant of £101,000 of Sport England for Leamington to increase physical activity levels and reduce sedentary behaviours.
- Homes and Housing
- Providing 60 new, affordable rental family Council properties and three additional sites in the pipeline through the Council’s Housing Acquisitions and Development Programme. continues to deliver with sites in development providing
- Tenant satisfaction feedback is well above Housemark benchmark averages.
- Preventing 366 applicants from becoming homeless between April and September 2024 – 38% more than same period the year before.
- Ensuring our social housing meets decent homes requirements - only 1.52% of Local Authority housing stock is assessed as non-decent, which is well below national averages
- Economic Growth and Place
- Continuing to successfully deliver regeneration projects with 14 and 9-11 Low Street, High Pavement House, Kings Mill Leisure Building and Planetarium projects now complete.
- Increasing footfall across all three town centres by 5%.
- Delivering a significant number of events attracting over 36,000 visitors in 2024 alone.
- Cleaner and Greener
- Collecting over 4,000 free bulky waste collections as part of the Big Ashfield Spring Clean
- Retaining seven Green Flag Awards for the main parks, maintaining the Council’s high standards in its public open spaces.
- Undertaking a variety of initiatives to address fly tipping, waste on land, littering, graffiti and dog fouling. Since April 2024, 76 warnings and notices have been issued, with Ashfield ranking better than average when compared nationally for occurrences of fly tipping.
- Progressing in the planting of more than 2,400 trees this year, which follows over 2,000 trees which were planted last year.
- Safer and Stronger
- Being awarded record sums of community safety funding with a further £476,168.30 being secured for 2024/2025.
- Increasing CCTV cameras across the District from 29 to 59 devices in the last three years.
- Recognising the Ashfield District as one of the lowest areas for reported crime per 1,000 population compared to another 15 comparable areas across England and Wales.
- Issuing 128 enforcement warnings and notices to tackle Anti-Social Behaviour and Statutory Nuisance.
- Innovate and Improve
- Receiving extremely positive Corporate Peer Challenge external assessment
- Improving accessibility of services to customers 24/7 through ongoing digital online developments
- Significantly improving customer telephone call answering with 62% reduction in call waiting times, and 54% reduction in abandonment rates.
- Delivering more than £2.5 million social value the Council’s procurement activity since April 2021 representing a delivered percentage of social value of 13.44% well above the target of 10%.
To read the full report, which highlights the Council’s full list of achievements in 2024, visit:
Cllr Jason Zadrozny, Leader of Ashfield District Council, said: “This report clearly highlights the mass of achievements we have made in 2024 through our Corporate Plan.
“2024 saw some key milestones including the opening of our fantastic Sherwood Observatory and works starting on more social housing than the Council has ever built before.
“2025 is set to be just as exciting with the opening of Cornerstone Theatre, and the construction of our flagship Automated Distribution and Manufacturing Centre (ADMC).
“We know that in many areas we already excel, but we want all our services to be the best.
“We are doing it through sheer determination and the belief that Ashfield and our residents and businesses deserve more.
“I look forward to seeing what else 2025 can bring.”
Theresa Hodgkinson, Chief Executive at Ashfield District Council, added: “2024 was a fantastic year for Ashfield District Council, which I am sure will continue into 2025.
“Our ambition is for everyone who lives, works, and visits Ashfield to be proud to do so.
“We are continuing our positive journey and really setting our sites on being ‘Great’ across all our services.”
