‘Some councils take six months to do things – not here’
THERE ARE a couple of hi-vis jackets in the back of Hambleton council leader Mark Robson’s car as he arrives to pick up
correspondent from Thirsk station on a chilly November morning.
Along with a pair of steel toecapped boots and a hard hat, the council-branded garments are on constant standby in case they’re needed for a photo shoot to illustrate one of the many development schemes on the go in his mostly rural North Yorkshire district.
This morning alone there are two, one at the site of a new junction to serve the 925-home Sowerby Gateway housing scheme south of Thirsk and another a few minutes later at a nearby sports village development.
Not everyone is happy with what is going on and as Coun Robson has his picture taken in Thirsk town centre, this time for ,heis accosted by a resident angry at the Highways Agency’s decision to close a local road near the Sowerby Gateway junction. “We had to delay the photograph while he had a rant and I put him right,” he says later.
One of only five people to lead Conservative-run Hambleton District Council since it formed in the 1970s, Coun Robson speaks with some pride at the progress being made on major council-led projects around his district.
A bridge and access road at the flood-hit Dalton Industrial Estate near Thirsk opened this year and will safeguard 1,000 jobs on the estate, he says, while last month planners approved a scheme to transform the historic prison site in Northallerton into a leisure and retail development featuring a cinema, shops and civic square.
Having taken over the leadership six years go, Coun Robson wants to make the second-tier authority more commercially-focused and selfsufficient, with the already scant levels of central government funding set to disappear entirely within two years.
“When I took over as leader in six years this May, we weren’t open for business, we didn’t do tourism, it was difficult,” he tells
“We were ahead of our game, ahead of some authorities, but we weren’t doing what I felt were key projects.
“It was the leadership prior to that who didn’t go down that road. We were out there doing a lot of projects but over the last six years I have ramped it up to a point where we are doing things like tourism.
“I need to look at (commercial) opportunities because a lot of authorities only have a financial strategy of three years, a lot of that is because they wouldn’t want to look beyond three years because of the unknown.
“Hambleton district has a 10year financial strategy that we update every year and we are in a very good financial situation.”
A recent high-profile intervention, where the council bought the Lambert Memorial Hospital in Thirsk from NHS Property Services for a below-market price of around £350,000, came to fruition after discussions at the highest level of government. Coun Robson shows no signs of hiding his district’s light under a bushel and is keen to point out that the £104 council tax charge by his authority for a Band D property is less than half that of nearby Richmondshire.
And describing the multimillion pound investment in local leisure centres to aid the district’s ageing population, he says: “Despite (Craven council leader) Richard Foster saying Craven is a really nice place to live, I’m sure it is, but my opinion is that Hambleton is even nicer.”