The first ever Fairtrade Business Awards were held in Bristol at Leigh Court and presented by BBC’s George Alagiah.

Bristol has been a Fairtrade City since 2005 and it is good to see more and more businesses embracing its ethos and following through with their actions. Last year Bristol won the outstanding achievement award at the national Fairtrade Fortnight Awards.

The overall winner was Bishopston Trading Company who are a great Bristol success story. In many ways they were at the vanguard of the Fairtrade movement in Bristol and across the region.  As Carolyn Whitwell and her colleagues built the business from the mid-1980s onwards, they led the way in developing a successful Fairtrade business model.

The trading partnership now provides employment in K. V. Kuppam in South India for almost 300 people, selling their goods in the Gloucester Road shop, Glastonbury and Totnes, as well as online.

The firm were an inspiration for many businesses, and today’s awards show how the Fairtrade ethic spreads across all sectors.

The other winners demonstrate this:

• Best Fairtrade Office, sponsored by Burges Salmon – Essential Trading Co-operative Ltd
• Best Fairtrade Retailer, sponsored by TLT LLC – Lush Handmade Cosmetics
• Best Fairtrade Catering Outlet  – UWE Catering Cart
• Best Fairtrade Accommodation – The Greenhouse B&B, in Southville

There is a great appetite among Bristol residents to trade fairly and be able to make more ethical buying choices. They have confidence in the Fairtrade mark because it guarantees small producers in developing countries a fair and living wage for their goods, as well as paying a social premium to the farming co-operative which can be used for health and social programmes.

Cllr Barbara Janke - Council Leader

Today is Budget Day at the city council. From 2pm the full council will debate proposals for the coming year’s spending put forward by my Lib Dem administration and amendments put forward by other parties.

This is the most important meeting of the council’s year for us and follows months of preparation, consultation and discussion.

Our detailed proposals were first published back in November 2011. You can find the full details of our budget proposals on the council website, and you can also see the amendments being proposed by other parties – see appendix 7 (pdf).

You can watch the live webcast of the budget debate. We’re also making a live running commentary available in a chatroom alongside the webcast, as we accept that it’s not always easy to follow these meetings. You will be able to ask for explanations of anything you’re not sure about, and also to share your opinions with other viewers as the debate goes on.

How the council decides to spend taxpayers’ money clearly reflects our priorities for the city, particularly at a time when times are tough and public spending is constrained because of the state of the economy.

This year we are having to make savings overall of around £21 million, on top of the £28 million of reductions we agreed this time last year. Over two years, this will mean that the money we spend on services will have fallen from around £400 million a year to about £350 million – a very considerable reduction.

My Liberal Democrat colleagues and I shaped our proposals in the context of the following priorities:

• To protect as much as possible the services relied on by the most vulnerable people in Bristol.
• To achieve substantial savings through being more efficient and smarter in the ways the council works, while protecting spending on front line services.
• To freeze council tax bills so help hard-pressed families and others, such as pensioners, on fixed incomes.
• To stimulate the local economy, helping to create jobs as well as building vital new amenities such as more classrooms for Bristol’s fast-growing population of young people, more swimming pools, and better transport infrastructure.

With 32 seats out of 70, the Liberal Democrats do not hold a majority and we will have to make some compromises with the other parties on the council. We may disagree with them about policy, but I know that councillors across the political spectrum all want the best for Bristol. The Liberal Democrats will go into this meeting proud of our record and of our proposals, but ready to accept that compromises will need to be made with others to secure agreement for the budget in the best interests of the city.

If you are not able to attend but would like to watch what happens this afternoon, I hope you will take the opportunity to watch online (live webcast of the budget debate). Feel free, also, to leave me your comments below.

Barbara Janke

Leader of Bristol City Council - Barbara Janke

As Leader of Bristol City Council, I want to use social media to reach out to a new and wider group of people, in new ways.  I want to share with you my thoughts around some of my priorities for Bristol, and on what we’re doing in the Council to help our city achieve its full potential.  I also want to hear back what you think.

That is why I have started this blog, and have started using Twitter more too.  You can follow me there at @Barbara_Janke, where I’ll be sharing snippets of news and views, and often pointing you towards details around important developments, so you can find out more.

I’ll promise to write around one new blog post a week, and also to read your responses.  Because of pressure of work, I won’t be able to respond to your comments on my posts immediately, but I will keep the comments open on each post, usually for a fortnight, and will generally respond once or twice in that period, addressing some common themes emerging.

Nor will I be able to respond individually to Tweets or comments on my blog posts.  If you have a complaint about the Council, or a particular problem you want my help with – please email me instead (barbara.janke@bristol.gov.uk), as I won’t be able to deal with it via Twitter or blog posts, nor to enter into a long dialogue through these sites.

So as to keep the tone constructive and polite, your comments will be moderated before they appear, so you will see a delay between submitting your responses and them going live.  View how we’re going to moderate comments.  Thanks for your patience.

Politics is a serious business, and it is good that people feel passionately about things – I certainly do. I honestly believe though that this doesn’t mean that it is necessary, let alone acceptable to be negative, aggressive, rude or to make personal attacks.  I’ll be holding all participants in my blog to those standards.

I look forward to sharing news and views with you over months and years ahead.  Thanks for reading, for joining in, and for your patience whilst I get used to blogging for the very first time.

Barbara Janke