Lots and lots of leaflets and Labour spin

I have pretty much spent the whole day delivering leaflets for the local elections. I am totally exhausted. I have spent 7 hours wandering up and down driveways and climbing up stairs in blocks of flats and my legs really ache!

On the plus side I discovered lots of opposition literature. It seems the Labour Party have been out today too.

Some of the stuff in their election literature is pretty negative and knocks the Conservatives. So I thought I'd take the opportunity to rebut all the Labour allegations. The Labour leaflet in Freemantle doesn't say that much. There is a comment about leisure though which is worth mentioning:

Voting Tory means cuts and sell offs. Alec Samuels (Conservative group leader on the Council) is quoted as saying "We believe the private sector provides the solutions to the Council's Leisure problems."

I am not really sure whether he said that but I certainly do not have a problem with that quote. We absolutely want to involve the private sector in running leisure in the City. We want private sector expertise and money to improve leisure. A prime candidate has to be the municipal golf course. That could be so much better if a keen entrepreneur took over.

My parents live in Shirley. I have been round there this evening and they showed me the Labour leaflet that they have had. It has a list of criticisms of the Conservatives. Again I will give my thoughts.

1. They repeat the same nonsense about leisure.

I am not sure why the local Labour party profess to be so anti the private sector. There is nothing in what the Conservatives would do with Leisure in the City that Tony Blair would object to and both of Southampton's Labour MPs vote for just about everything TonyBlairs Government comes up with (Foundation Hospitals, PFI, Trust Schools etc.).

2. Tories say they would sell off Council Housing to a private landlord.

In fact the Government has skewed funding of housing so that it is not economically viable in the long run for Council Housing to remain in Council hands. The Government is doing everything it can to get Council's to sell housing to a private landlord. The shortfall in housing funding running up to 2030 is about 1/4 of a billion pounds in Southampton. Southampton Conservatives do think that tenants would be better of with a registered social landlord. However we didn't actually vote for this. Tenants were balloted on their views and the vast majority wanted to stay with the Council. The Conservative Group respected this. Furthermore plenty of Conservative Councils still manage their own housing stock.

3. Tory budget plans would slash council jobs, devastating vital services like road maintenance and street cleansing.

This simply not true. What we said was that we would be more disciplined with staffing given that its the largest part of the Council budget. In a tiny fraction of back office areas, we would not necessarily refill vacant posts. Road maintenance and street cleaning is a very high priority for us and we are keen to reverse the years of neglect to our roads from 20 years of Labour.

4. Tory councilors opposed extra funds to tackle anti social behaviour.

We didn't support the Labour budget which included a token increase in expenditure on anti social behaviour. However we are concerned about value for money unlike Labour. The City council is massively underfunded by Government which means that we struggle each year to fund everything we would like to do. We did include innovative proposals to get more special constables on the beat. Since Labour has come to power nationally the number of specials has halved. We are planning to scrap Council tax for specials. In Hull I understand that this has led to the recruitment of an addition 100 specials. If we could achieve that in Southampton it would make a massive difference.

5. Tory Councillors voted to with LibDems to prevent Southampton pensioners traveling free on buses across Hampshire.

The truth is that the Government requires all Councils to have free bus travel for pensioners and has provided some funding to help achieve this. Southampton introduced free buses on 1st April. The actual costs of introducing this are unknown and will be determined by how much the service is taken up. The scheme in Southampton only includes free travel out of the City to a select number of destinations. However it is free within the City boundaries. Extending the scheme beyond the City is of course desirable and everyone would want to see that. However it will cost a lot more money. If we can afford it in the future then I hope it will be implemented. Labour are running around telling everyone that they would have free travel all across Hampshire. They are saying this because one of their Councillors stood up in a meeting and proclaimed that it would be a good idea. However the extra funding was not in their proposed budget for the City in February. Also when they ran the City they actually cut subsidies to pensioners using the buses.

If you want to see how the Conservatives run councils you do not have to look far. Southampton is surrounded by councils run by us: Test Valley, Hampshire, New Forest. On the whole they are much better run than Southampton.