York homelessness services win gold standard award

 City of York Council’s services for preventing and managing homelessness are in the country’s top three and have been given the gold service standard.

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The award was confirmed by the national governing body this week and York is the third local authority in England to ever win it.

The National Practitioner Support Service (NPSS) – funded by the Department of Communities and Local Government – has confirmed that the council has achieved the standard required. The Gold Standard can only be achieved by demonstrating that the service has a focus on early intervention and prevention of homelessness at its core.
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Chance to bid for a share of £30,000 to help reduce waste in York

slothCommunity groups across York are being given the chance to bid for a share of £30,000 to support community projects that could help reduce waste.

The kinds of projects the fund will support includes:

  • Reducing waste from households e.g. reduce household waste going into the grey bin / helping to increase the amount of waste recycled
  • Promoting waste prevention e.g. encouraging reuse, repair and recycling of items / reducing food waste (in line with the Love Food Hate Waste campaign)
  • Reducing carbon emissions e.g. finding alternative options for composting garden waste for households with no collection / using lower carbon travel alternatives

Registered charities, not-for-profit organisations (including social enterprises), community or voluntary groups, schools, colleges or universities, residents associations and Parish Councils can all apply for funding. Projects can also include a partnership with a private sector organisation.

Cllr Andrew Waller, Executive Member for the Environment, said: “This fund is a great opportunity to help communities and groups reduce waste and encourage re-use. By providing the funding to enable them to get their campaigns off the ground, this will really help us to create a more sustainable and resilient One Planet York, and make York the “Greenest City in the North”. We encourage as many groups as possible to apply for this funding before 20 January.”

Groups can apply for any amount of funding between £1 and £5,000 but if there are a large number of good applications then awards may be reduced proportionately.

The closing date for applications is 5pm Friday 20 January 2017.

To request an application form please email ycc@york.gov.uk with the subject ‘York Community Recycling Fund’.

To find out more information visit: www.york.gov.uk/recyclingfund, which includes examples of the types of schemes the council will fund, how to apply, the timescales for applying and further supporting information.

Council supports students to recycle up to £102k-worth of donations for charity

Recycling promoted by City of York Council, university students and The British Heart Foundation (BHF) could have raised up to £102,312 for the charity last academic year.recycling-community-9155

With council and university officers promoting recycling to students and by BHF providing recycling banks, 7,380 bags were donated between October 2015 to September 2016 to go towards funding the fight against heart disease

For the fourth year running, BHF shops have teamed up with University of York, York St John’s University and City of York Council to encourage students to have an end of year clear out and responsibly dispose of unwanted items by recycling them or by donating them to the charity.

The council donation drop-off points and BHF bins located in areas near where students live were well-used. The clothes, shoes, books, DVDs, bags and small electricals no longer needed are now being sold in BHF shops to help fund BHF research.
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York car parking chaos – time to act

Saturdays traffic log jam in the City was partly down to lack of information about car parking space availability.

The Council’s “on line” site http://www.yorklive.info/ still does not provide the kind of information that was available 15 years ago, we – together with many other Cities – had a system which showed the total number of spaces at car parks and the number of spaces that were free at each.

Council web site

Council web site

The web site is still available (click here) but it is not updated and indeed contains details of car parks which no longer exist, while the number of spaces at others is clearly wrong. It currently advises users that the Leeman Road “commuter” car park has -1 spaces.

The “on line” system has not worked properly since the Council moved offices 4 years ago,

Street information boards on the arterial roads, that indicated where parking space could be found, have also been removed.

The result is that large numbers of cars circle the City looking for parking spaces – adding unnecessarily to congestion and pollution levels.

By now the City should have a system linked with satellite navigation services which would guide drivers to the nearest available free space. Far from moving forward with this kind of the improvement, the Council seems to be heading backwards into the mid twentieth century.

Once popular car parks like the 290 space Piccadilly multi storey have seen usage fall since the space available signs were withdrawn

The Council may be reluctant to publicise car parks in the city centre as it – understandably – wants to encourage the use of park and ride, but it needs to make a policy statement quickly on what it is doing, and what it plans to do in the future, to deal with demand peaks.

The Council makes over £2 million a year “profit” on car parking in the City. It would be well advised to plough some of this back into resurfacing the car parks and providing 21st century standards of information.

Hopefully they will be able to do something before the two busiest days of the year (the Saturday before Christmas and Christmas Eve) when pressure on spaces will peak.