WARRINGTON Borough Council’s leader wants to ‘reduce’ council investments and have ‘less dependence’ on them – while replacing the money they generate with public funding.

Cllr Hans Mundry saw off a leadership challenge in May.

He remained in the role after winning the vote at the Labour group’s annual general meeting at the Town Hall.

It came days after the election, which saw Labour retain control of the council and increase its majority by six. It now has 42 of the 58 seats on the council.

Speaking on Tuesday, he shared his vision for Warrington.

“What I would like to do is to make sure we can develop a town where people want to come and live, they can have a future here, they can have a good time, a good quality of life, prosper, and have job opportunities for people,” he said.

“The future would be looking at where people can live, housing is always a big issue – we have thousands of people on the waiting list, waiting to get proper housing, and seeing where they get built and what type of housing.

“We would like to have some say on actually fitting the needs of our community with the proper housing, to marry the two up – so we are not just getting housing built for profit, we are getting housing built for some profit for the developers, but to make sure they meet the needs of the growing town.

“So we would like to have some sort of say in that, at present we’ve not had as much as we’d like to have, I’m hoping with the new Government we get more of a say to say if we need more housing for elderly we can actually factor that in, if we need more first-time houses for young people to get started, and social housing, where they can keep the rents to an acceptable level, we would like to have some sort of say and some control in terms of what happens going forward, to make sure everybody has an opportunity to actually live in the town and have a prosperous future.”

Council leader Cllr Hans Mundry

Furthermore, Cllr Mundry was asked if he is hopeful the situation for council finances could change with the new Government.

He said: “I think the Labour Government has come in with an empty pot, so we’re finding news that the situation is worse nationally than we thought it was.

“But Warrington has always managed to deliver a lot, well above its weight with the resources it has.

“We would be better off if we didn’t have to do that, if we had more resources we could deliver even better for our residents.

“I think some of the things we have been doing have been paying off for us.

“The investments we have does fetch in £23 million, after paying all the interest off itself, so it doesn’t cost the taxpayer any money, it actually generates income overall.

“So, the investments are delivering for us, but we wouldn’t like to take that on as an indefinite, we would like to see public services being public funded – that’s where we would like to get to with the new Government in time.”

Cllr Mundry highlighted his hopes in the future to ‘release some of our investments and replace that with public funding, so the people of Warrington don’t lose out’.

“What we don’t want to do is lose the investment income and have nothing to replace it with other than council cuts,” he said.

Cllr Mundry said he thinks ‘the programme isn’t going to go forward the way it has been doing’.

“What I am looking for is to try and get public funds to fund public services and go away from being dependent on investments to fill that gap,” he added.

“Previously, we’ve had 14 years of a Government that has been starving local authorities, like ours, all up and down the country, of vital funds they need to provide vital services to the people.

“What Warrington did was found a way of filling that gap and investing to fill the gap where the Government was taking money away from the people of Warrington.

“What I am trying to do now, what I would like to see, is a way of filling that gap with public funds, getting a better deal from the Government for the people of Warrington, and having less dependence on the investments to fill the gap for us.

“So I would like to sort of reduce the investments we’ve got there at a steady pace to make sure we can replace it with other resources.”