The Hunt is over. Sheffield has a new leader

We’ve had an amazing start to our campaign to make Sheffield better and get 1,000 new members. Our first ever Tribune print edition arrived at our Leah’s Yard offices just in time for us to give out at our fifth birthday celebrations on Thursday evening, and our team have been busy giving them out across the city ever since.

Our campaign is a quid pro quo between us and you, our readers. If we get an extra 1,000 members over the next four weeks, we promise to fulfil five pledges to the city which will make Sheffield even better than it already is. They include more reporting from the council chamber (like this piece) and a monthly good news edition to show how much amazing work happens here. This is our way of giving back to the city for your support over the last five years, but we will need your support to do it.

We want as many people to get involved as possible, so we’ve made it pay what you want: no matter your budget you can get behind the campaign. Simply click on the link below, choose your level of support, and join the thousands of Sheffieders who are already playing their part in making this great city a better place to live.

Get us to 1,000

It’s a hazy, unsettled, day when I run into Sheffield’s new council leader, Fran Belbin. She’s wearing a leopard print fur coat, leopard print shoes and is smoking a cigarette outside Boots: three things it is frankly impossible to imagine her predecessor, Tom Hunt, doing.

From a style perspective, it’s an abrupt shift from buttoned-up to glam. But Belbin was Hunt’s deputy before taking over, following his exit at the hands of Walkley’s voters. I want to find out if anything of more substance will be shifting at the Town Hall.

Arranging a meet up with Belbin isn’t easy. Later that afternoon, when I text Belbin to suggest an alternative time, that also doesn’t work. What about after the council’s AGM  on Thursday? Not a goer, she tells me, as she’ll be getting in a car immediately afterwards and driving to Bearded Theory festival in Derbyshire.

Eventually we agree to breakfast over the weekend, at Taste of Arabia in Firth Park. She arrives early, wearing oversized navy blue linen and a chunky silver necklace, and is immediately pulled aside by two local residents who want to tell her about their litter picking efforts in the ward, with the enthusiasm of pupils looking for praise from a beloved schoolteacher. She waves them away and they scuttle off. Inside, she greets the staff and orders a mint tea.

The local elections in the previous week delivered the worst results for Labour in living memory. The party retained only three councillors up for re-election, losing seven seats to Reform and four to the Greens.

This means Belbin is facing a daunting undertaking. Her predecessor, Tom Hunt, had to contend with managing a council when he had direct leadership of just under a half of the city’s councillors. But Belbin is now having to manage with fewer than 1 in 3. And Hunt had, at least in theory, overall leadership of a partnership containing virtually every councillor — the three-way tie-up between Labour, the Liberal Democrats and the Greens. But a few days before this year’s AGM, the Lib Dems dropped a bombshell announcement: they would be pulling out of this entente cordiale. Now, between them the Labour and the Greens have a wafer-thin majority — if just two councillors were to rebel on any issue the leadership would be sunk.

So who is Belbin, a councillor with little profile before her sudden ascent to the top? And can she meet this fearsome political challenge?