I wanted to focus my Clydebank column with a few positives this time but I will touch on a few challenges as well.

On Wednesday February 7, the council agreed to set up a Clydebank Towns Board to ensure that we had appropriate governance in place for the £20m of Levelling Up funding that we got for our town. This will allow us to spend £15 million on capital investment projects and give us another £5m of revenue funding as well which gives the new Towns Board flexibility on how they can spend so long as it fits in with the UK Government criteria.

Unfortunately, we can’t spend the money on council priorities like council housing, parks, or road maintenance.

However, the Board would be able to spend the much-needed money on projects that could help to regenerate our area and help to make it easier for others to build new homes, improve and improve traffic flows and so on which can help to attract businesses to the Clydebank.

We already have an approved Clydebank Town Centre Plan so the Board will take that into account when developing their medium and long term plans for the new investment.

I was particularly pleased to learn that the principal of West College Scotland Liz Connolly, has been confirmed as chair of our Town Board and I want to wish her success with this exciting endeavour.

I know how much the cost of living is impacting on individuals, families, and communities and I am delighted that the Labour council took an early decision to invest millions of pounds to help.

We have helped foodbanks with funding to supplement their food donations, we have helped families with free swim, gym and with fourteen free family fun days and these will continue over the next three years. And we have helped community groups to access funding from our Cost of Living Capital Fund such as funding to the Faifley Pantry to purchase a new van.

More recently, we helped Golden Friendship with 50 per cent of the costs of a new £40,000 air conditioning unit to help alleviate dampness, we also able to award £20,000 towards the purchase of a Transit double cab-in-van to maximise the support and engagement they can provide for the wider Faifley community, we also awarded Kinship Carers £22,500 towards their warm space hub for families and a variety of equipment such as a TV, fridge, microwave, gaming hardware, iPads, laptop and computer to keep the young people occupied while the group members could have some time to unwind.

I know how important all of this has been to the groups and I’m really proud that we have been able to help where we can.

I know that the coming weeks will be very stressful as we go through the council budget process.

Unfortunately, we don’t get enough money from the SNP Government to be able to keep all the services we currently have and we will do our very best to try and help out where we can but without proper funding we are faced with an exceptionally challenging budget.