Cabinet members at Cheshire West & Chester Council are being urged by the leader and chief executive to support the move towards a combined authority with a directly elected mayor and spending controls transferred from Whitehall.
The Government named its next four science and innovation audit areas in the North, as part of a £4.7bn push into research and development initiatives.
The government gave a mixed message on its stance towards EU-funded projects, Hammond saying that guarantees would be extended to all contracts “signed after the Autumn Statement and before the UK’s departure from the European Union”, but only if they were deemed important enough to the country.
The government appears to have offered a lifeline to bidders for EU funding by relenting on a deadline of today’s Autumn Statement for applications to be approved in order to secure guarantees from the UK in the wake of the referendum result.
Cheshire East Council is to shortly begin procuring for a design-and-build contractor to deliver the £90m Congleton link road, and is assessing methods to allow preparatory works to start in January 2018.
Cheshire East Council is to establish a cross-party working group “to develop the best possible case” for devolution, and “create debate around devolved powers for Cheshire”, after its joint devolution bid stalled earlier this year.
Six government ministers are expected to attend the MIPIM UK property conference next week, due to take place from Wednesday 19 October at Olympia in London.
The planning inspector overseeing Cheshire East’s draft Local Plan set the tone on the first day of resumed hearings yesterday, saying that while he still had “outstanding concerns” about the borough’s development blueprint, “we live in an imperfect world and we need to be pragmatic”.
A £4m ERDF project to fit fibre broadband within and between Cheshire and Warrington’s science parks is “significantly at risk” of not going ahead due to new application deadlines imposed post-Brexit for EU funding.
More than three quarters of the North West’s local authority areas declared in favour of leaving the European Union.
