Council leaders on Covid-19

The chief executive of South Holland District Council has said a fund could soon be created to help businesses affected by the Covid-19 outbreak.

Anna Graves told a meeting of the authority’s Cabinet on Monday that she had been in a meeting with the Secretary of State Dominic Raab with regards the outbreak and its impact.

She said: “As part of the resilience planning that the government is looking at some specific ‘hardship fund’ as they’re calling it.

“I was invited to a meeting yesterday with government leaders and it’s likely to come in the next couple of days.

“How big that pot is and who administers it, it’s still unclear but its highly likely it will be district councils.

“The message the Secretary of State gave to us was to gear up our financial and revenue services to be able to administer not just the discount and discretionary stuff we do, but how we will administer a much bigger pot of funding.

“We can tell businesses the council is here to support you, come and talk to us.

“We will be pro-actively going into businesses and finding how they are and what support and guidance we can give them.

“We need them to focus on supporting the local economy.

“The Secretary of State said the care services, protecting the vulnerable and the local economy are the three main priorities which this sits within.

“So these services are moving and we need to support those services.

“A lot of businesses are going to be under a lot of pressure and we need to support them in whatever way we can.”

At the meeting the authority’s principal officer for finance Coun Peter Coupland spoke about recently updated guidance for business rate relief and urged businesses to get in touch.

“We have a lot of businesses in the area and we hope that all those businesses come through this long dark tunnel they’re in at the moment,” he said.

“We’ll need to give them as much support as we can give through government legislation and I do sincerely hope they all get through this difficult patch.

“We might be inundated with a lot of discretionary claims but we have to deal with that as they come.

“We’re against the unknown and I think it will get quite serious.

“We need to help business owners.”

Closing the meeting, leader of the council Lord Gary Porter, said: “There will be a greater shift from all our services to maintain frontline services that effect our most vulnerable people.”