Further thoughts on the budget...

I was very interested to read the write up in last night's Echo (including the editorial) on Wednesday's City Council budget meeting.

One thing the article ommitted to mention was the significant cuts to social services, the impact of which I have mentioned in previous posts.

St Marys Sports centre has been "saved". An additional £65,000 has been found to keep the centre going. However no additional money has been found to tackle the £1.8m backlog in repairs needed. The extra money will keep the centre going until after the elections in May and then we will shall be back at square one. We should remember that Labour allowed St Marys to deteriorate to the state it is in, and the Lib Dems have dithered for the last few years about addressing the problem. Very soon someone is going to have to look at the situation again and make a proper decision.

Labour described the Conservative budget as being "mickey mouse". We take that with a pinch of salt because it is what they say every year. They would suggest anything but an inflation busting increase in Council Tax is unrealistic. The reality is that only one party on the Council is prepared to excerise any degree of financial prudence and that is the Conservatives.

The Echo likes to dramatise things and talked about the loss of 40 jobs. Well that isn't really true. The City Council employs 10,000 people and takes on dozens of new people a month. It is a very good employer and it is very easy for those in posts that are being 'deleted' in the budget to be given other excellent jobs working for the Council. Therefore we are not talking large scale compulsory redundancies.

The Conservatives have suggested many times that the best way to control costs and keep tax under control is to be more careful when taking on new staff. The Echo suggested that we would have a recruitment freeze. Again that's not quite true. We would have a much stricter policy in certain key areas in the back office. Rather than automatically refilling all vacant posts we would question whether new staff do in fact need to be taken on. This is how businesses run things.

The Echo didn't mention any of the excellent ideas that the Conservatives proposed. The other parties also chose to ignore them. We put forward lots of ideas on how to reduce crime and improve the environment. We are not too dispondent. Our suggestions were ignored last year too. However shortly after the budget meeting an emergency motion was rushed through Council to introduce one of our flagship recycling policies. We will be very happy if some of our policies are quietly adopted by the Administration in the coming months.