Imran Khan on Labour’s Bradford legacy

If a Bradford district resident has a Labour councillor, they have a local representative who cares deeply about the people they represent. That’s our first priority – being good local representatives who support people in the community to help get things done. Labour councillors are a team who will work hard for residents – and we want the best for every part of the district.

It goes without saying we had an extremely difficult election in May. It was a bruising election for Labour councillors everywhere, a kind of tsunami across the country. We respect what the electorate told us.

Not only are we continuing to listen and learn, but we’re also redoubling our efforts to deliver on our core Labour values to make ordinary people’s lives better. We also have a new leader of the party in Andy Burnham, who is a friend of Bradford, and he is someone who cares passionately about putting good core Labour values into action to help ordinary families live better lives.

While listening and learning more about what we need to do better, we can also be proud of what we got right and the fact that we always worked hard to make the district a better place.

We transformed the city centre, making it into a civic space for Bradford to be proud of. It’s now a cleaner and greener city centre built for people to enjoy and for businesses to grow.

We had the district awarded UK City of Culture, which attracted audiences of over three million people, with 5,500 residents benefiting from training, artist development, mentoring and paid work placements. It also saw a significant increase in overnight stays and the city host the Turner Prize.

We planted a tree for every child, too. And we literally put Bradford on the map with the ambitious plan for a new city centre station on Northern Powerhouse Rail that will unlock a huge regeneration area for new jobs, homes and businesses.

We secured a huge grants package for cleaner vehicle upgrades, delivering cleaner air, which led to 700 fewer GP visits a month thanks to improved health while saving thousands of pounds for the NHS.

We tackled homelessness with award-winning teams working on the ground. We substantially upgraded our parks and play spaces across the district. We invested in 450 new SEND places for children to learn closer to home. We secured an almost uniquely high funding pot for Keighley and Shipley to fund business growth and public realm improvements.

Just this year, the Labour government has provided a massive increase in funding to the council. This shifts significantly what the council is able to fund, and as a first step, we reinvested more in the frontline services that matter most to residents.

In the council budget that we approved earlier this year, we put more money into tackling litter and fly-tipping, an extra £1 million to clear more gullies, remove more nuisance vehicles and to hold a day of action every single weekday of the year.

We restored the local events and festivals budget, we put more funding in to tackle dangerous driving and we funded an expansion of the youth service – something that many other councils cut when faced with Tory austerity.

I’m especially proud of a key achievement in my portfolio – which even the new Reform council leader has praised – which is the fact that our Labour council achieved the lowest NEET rate in more than a decade.

There was something strikingly familiar about the tagline for Bradford Council’s ten-year regeneration and growth plan, Built Different. I was sure that I had come across it before. It felt like something from an action movie from the 80s or 90s ...

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We managed to bring the proportion of 16-18-year-olds not in education, employment or training down to its lowest level since 2013. We achieved that by investing in new opportunities for residents to upskill themselves and linking them with local employers.

Let’s be clear, the key to these achievements was having a positive vision and then allocating sensible funding to deliver a sizeable return on investment for residents – as opposed to the false economy of managed decline.

That is one of the key concerns with the new Reform leadership – their ideology is for more of the same austerity that damaged the country so badly through the 14-plus years of chaos and anaemic economic growth by Tory governments ...