Lincolnshire County Council’s Children’s Services and the Lincolnshire Safeguarding Children Board are providing good, effective, timely support for children and families.

That’s the message from the recent Ofsted report into the support provided to children and their families, and safeguarding services. Lincolnshire’s is the second best Ofsted rating in the country since inspections became more stringent last year.

A council tax increase of 1.9% has been included in our budget proposals for 2015/16.

Alternatives such as freezing council tax or increasing it by a lesser amount would mean reducing our planned level of service to make the necessary savings. To increase council tax by more than 1.9% would mean holding a referendum at an estimated cost of £800,000.

Minister visits Lincoln University Technology Hub as Lincolnshire broadband rollout reaches 74k homes in Lincolnshire and a national milestone of £2 Million accross the UK.

The project has now brought access to better broadband to 74,000 county homes and businesses, with many able to enjoy superfast speeds.

The visit coincided with news that the national rollout had hit the major milestone of two million premises reached.

Protection of the Natural Environment and Biodiversity of Lincolnshire for future generations is now given the priority it deserves by the Executive of Lincolnshire County Council.

The Conservative led council has placed a renewed focus on developers meeting strict planning criteria before building wind farms. For example amenity of existing residential occupants must be maintained at an acceptable level in particular, no wind turbine should be constructed within 2km of a single residential property, and no wind farms should be constructed with 10km of a village with more than 10 properties.

Lincolnshire Road Safety Partnership (LRSP) has recently launched a county wide Community Speed Watch (CSW) initiative.

This has been designed to empower local communities to tackle non-safety critical speeding issues. The new scheme looks to build on the success of previous initiatives including the passive Notices used within ‘Parish Calm’ whilst addressing the shortcomings of manually deployed reactive signs used in ‘Parish Link’.