Last year, we published our promises for our four-year term in the Council Plan. They represent the ways that we will work towards our main goal – making sure that everyone can live a long, healthy, happy life, in communities full of pride and identity.

We’ve been working hard for the last year, and have made incredible progress on our three key priorities – fighting inequality, tackling the climate crisis and creating good jobs.

In our recent residents’ survey, 84% of you told us you were satisfied with your local area, and 85% said that our borough was a place where people got on well together. You also told us that feeling safe is important and that many of you are worried about the cost of living.

It’s not possible to list everything, but here are some of the things that we are proudest to have achieved during 2022-23. And you can watch a video of me talking about these highlights, above.

Fighting inequality

We’ve been tackling the deep-rooted inequalities in our borough, and we launched the new Citizens’ Tribunal.

Giving our children and young people the best possible start in life is one of the most important things we can do. We have improved our services for young people leaving care and encouraged more than 19,000 attendances at our youth centres, and we have created 50 more places for children with Special Educational Needs and Disabilities.

We’ve worked to improve the lives of 3,000 residents with care needs by investing £4.5million in adaptions to help them remain independent in their own homes.

Not only are we the best council in London at preventing homelessness, we’re also running one of the most ambitious council homebuilding programmes in London, with more than a thousand genuinely affordable homes started in the last year.

We published our strategy for tackling male violence against women and girls and taken real steps to make our streets safer including enhanced CCTV coverage and improvements to street lighting.

We want everyone to feel that Ealing is a great place to live and we’ve opened our doors to refugees including 800 Ukrainian guests.

We launched our new Cultural Manifesto and I, like many other Ealing residents, was inspired by the celebration of our cultural diversity at fantastic events like the King’s Coronation.

Tackling the climate crisis

We made tackling the climate crisis and improving the local environment one of our top priorities.

We launched our new Active Travel Charter and invested £7.7million to improve our roads and pavements making it safer and easier for you to walk, cycle or scoot more to reduce pollution and improve health.

We have also increased the number of our successful school streets to a total of 21, so that children and parents can feel safer getting out of their cars on the school run.

The number of public electric vehicle charging points has also been more than doubled and there are now 298 across the borough.

We’ve already planted 7,000 new trees and mapped out a plan to achieve our target of 50,000 new trees by May 2026.

And we have opened two new community growing spaces in the borough to help meet rising demand from people who are keen to grow and share food.

Creating good jobs – and supporting residents through the cost of living crisis

We are proud to have introduced the Real Living Wage to the home care sector ahead of schedule, making sure these essential workers are properly paid.

And we have successfully encouraged 53 local businesses to become Living Wage Employers.

We have helped more than 1,000 people who were facing the toughest barriers into employment and created over five hundred apprenticeships.

Helping those most in need with rising costs we have distributed almost £5.8million of financial support, including Household Support Funding and extra council tax support.

We have been helping people get online through our Digital Champions scheme, as well as donating 1,100 surplus laptops and giving out 150 free mobile data SIMs.

Watch this space…

A lot has been achieved but we know there is always more to be done.

Building on these successes we will set ambitious but realistic targets for 2023-2024, and we’ll continue to update you regularly – so, watch this space.