WE have seen over the past few weeks a gradual but fairly consistent rise in our local Covid cases.

It is clear we are not out of the woods yet, and with winter around the corner we will need to be prepared for the impact on our health and council services.

It is why I have retained the 'response' aspect in our 3 Rs plan for the borough – the others being 'recovery' and 'regeneration'. Key to this will be avoiding a collapse in the NHS services we rely on.

Our GPs, nurses and hospital staff continue to go the extra mile in responding to the challenges before them.

To hear stories about abuse and even violent attacks against those in the health service worries me deeply. Now is the time we need to be giving more support to our health workers, not less. We owe them that much following the pandemic.

That is why the Government need to get a grip on the looming crisis in the health service.

We are seeing more and more hospital beds filling up again with Covid patients, putting enormous strains on capacity for non-Covid related cases. Waiting lists for elective care are growing longer and longer, with one senior Greater Manchester health official telling me this week the outlook is the worst on record.

Mental health services, especially for our younger people, are getting harder to access for those who need them. This is having a massive impact on schools and families just at the time when we need to be getting on with an ambitious education recovery effort.

What have we had so far from the Government though? A manifesto breaking move to hike up National Insurance, which one Tory MP rightly called a 'jobs tax' – that delivers half what the NHS needs and nothing towards the social care demands councils like ours are dealing with.

And we are seeing an even bigger squeeze on household budgets with the cut to Universal Credit, energy price rises, fuel and food costs rising and now talk of council tax rises being pushed on councils, and the taxpayer, to make up for a lack of central government funding.

Last week the council indicated our services were being short-changed by an additional £19m over the next two years, even with a council tax increase of two per cent factored in. This is simply not sustainable or fair.

I am calling on the Government to get a grip and be serious about fixing these problems. We cannot simply lurch from one crisis to the next and hope that somehow this will all work out if we ignore it for long enough.