Barnsley elections 2024: Council leader, Stephen Houghton CBE, re-elected by voters

Barnsley Council leader Steve Houghton CBE has been re-elected.  This is what he said to Chloe Aslett after winning...

Transcript

00:00 I am always nervous. When you go to the electorate you've got to be respectful of people

00:04 and you never quite know what's going to happen. So anyone who thinks, oh we're going away and it's

00:08 a foregone conclusion, that's a huge mistake. Never take the public for granted. So I've been

00:13 doing this a long time, been through lots of elections, but that anticipation, that nervousness,

00:18 that nervous excitement is always going to be there, that never changes. But I'm just hugely

00:24 grateful to the people of Cudworth for giving me another go again and obviously to the people of

00:29 Barnsley for continuing to support Labour because the Labour council in Barnsley, we're doing some

00:33 great things in Barnsley. Double council of the year. This week the government produced

00:40 league tables on where councils are. We're at the top. So yeah, really pleased in taking Barnsley

00:47 forward. Yeah, it's a real positive time to be here. Brilliant. Okay and then specifically in

00:53 terms of like taking Barnsley forward, what are your sort of priorities next? Moving forward,

00:57 right okay. Well we're just starting commencement of the youth zone, which is a state-of-the-art

01:02 facility for all our young people, right next to the bus station. So everyone can access that from

01:07 across the borough. That's a 13 million pound project. They're on site at the minute. We're

01:13 going to develop the, what was the courthouse car park area, into what we call the scene.

01:19 New car parking, new urban green space and new businesses on that site. And of course a big

01:25 project in the Alhambra centre is Health on the High Street, which is going to bring out services

01:30 from the hospital right into the town centre. That'll deal with some of the congestion and car

01:35 parking challenges up at the hospital, make services easy to access for people as we've seen

01:40 with the community diagnostic centre. So they're all great things in the town centre, but we've

01:44 also got big plans for all our principal towns and villages. A 30 million pound project spread

01:50 across the borough, which everyone will see some investment in. So really great, great news. I

01:55 think it's a wonderful time to be leader of Bowsley Council. Brilliant. Okay. And then last of all,

02:00 I suppose, speaking nationally today, Labour's sort of performance across the board and then

02:05 so far here in Bowsley today as well. How are you feeling? Well, we've maintained our majority,

02:10 which I think was the most we could do because we've got large numbers of Labour councillors. So

02:14 really pleased to do that. From a national perspective, yeah, you can see things are

02:19 changing. You can see the public wanting new government. The country's stagnating. It feels

02:26 a lack of hope across the nation at the moment. We need to change that. Keir Starmer and his

02:32 colleagues bring some freshness to government, some new ideas, get the NHS sorted out, get our

02:37 public services sorted out, get the economy and finances back on track. There's a lot to look