by Paul Scully | Mar 4, 2008 | News |
Last night we had our annual bunfight that is the Budget debate. It was a strange affair, with little offered by the LibDems. Instead they say smugly attacking the Conservatives. As a politician, I don’t mind this. As a resident, this leaves me fuming. Who on earth is running the Borough if the LibDems are continuing to act as an Opposition party rather than a group that should have a positive track record to boast about after 22 years with their hands on the purse strings.
I’ll cover the Budget in two posts as one matter caught my eye in particular and illustrates the LibDem Council’s approach to their Budget perfectly. We caught the LibDems out using the interest from huge sums of Government money to lessen its own council tax increase. Conservative councillors discovered that the mystery savings which cut the increase from the controversial 4.9% to the ‘benign’ 3.4% has come from a variety of sources including the interest creamed off from the Building Schools for the Future funding for Stanley Park High School in Carshalton, and a surplus of council tax from new homes.
This follows the previous controversy when the Lib Dem Council consulted on a 4.9% projected council tax increase in December 2007. The current above inflation increase of 3.4% has been set by using additional money from sources termed in council-speak as “slippage” and the “buoyancy of the Council Tax base”. We confronted the Lib Dem finance executive councillor for either not being up-front about this hidden surplus when official documents announced a 4.9% increase or for simply not knowing of its existence through incompetence. No answer was forthcoming.
During the debate the LibDem executive councillor for learning services confirmed that quarterly instalments of £2.056 million have been received by the Council – from the Department for Children, Schools and Families – totalling some £6.168 million. He also confirmed that projected earnings in interest were £150,000 for 2007/08. After considerable pressure from Conservatives over the last week, he agreed that all revenue in interest should be ‘ring-fenced’ to be used exclusively on the project to build the new Stanley Park School.
It is good news that they have reversed their policy under pressure to ensure that the considerable revenue in interest from the school grant will be used only for the benefit of the Stanley Park School. Using this money’s interest to partially offset the council tax increase is just not acceptable. School children should not be short-changed because this Council can’t control it’s spending.
This does mean that the budget is now incorrect to the tune of £150,000 because the Lib Dems cannot cream it off anymore. How will they make up this shortfall? Maybe we can do a swap with parents’ School Vouchers?
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by Paul Scully | Feb 20, 2008 | News |
As the Battle of Cheam Baths rages, we are no further in finding out what future the Leisure Centre has. We were told that the LibDems do not know what the future of the site is and so cannot guarantee its future. The following week we were told that it will stay open for the time being as £500,000 is being spent on it. A costly consultation report has been sat on someone’s desk since December which looks into future of Leisure provision in the Borough but consideration of this report seems to be going at a leisurely pace. It was supposed to be discussed at the January Executive Meeting. Towards the end of January we were told that it would be before Easter. Looking at the document which details the timetable over the next quarter for items to be discussed by the Executive, I see that the Leisure Centre Strategy has been quietly dropped. This means that it will be the summer at the earliest before we can see what may happen.
If this site closes there will be no public provision in the west of the Borough with the east benefitting from four centres. Jonathan Pritchard discussed the situation with Boris Johnson on a recent visit. The irony was not lost that as Stratford gets new Olympic facilities paid for by residents of Cheam and beyond, this part of the Borough suffers. The amount in Olympic tax paid for by Sutton residents over the coming years would be enough to bring both Cheam Leisure Centre and Westcroft up to a decent standard.
by Paul Scully | Feb 20, 2008 | News |
The Council introduced a major change to how councillors scrutinised decisions by the Executive – the Cabinet of lead councillors – and departmental performance. Previously we sat as officers queued up to give us long verbal reports and asked a few polite questions. Now the process is member-led and works more in the style of a Parliamentary Select Committee where we choose what we want to investigate and gather evidence.
I welcome the changes but we still have a long, long way to go before the process is in anyway effective. Last night was a good example when we looked at the problems caused by the Kimpton rubbish dump to nearby residents. We listened to officers before Christmas explaining about noise at the site. We had to make decisions from reports which referred to various noises measured in dBa, dBeq and dBLA90. Now come on, stay with me. Don’t glaze over just yet.
I asked that the residents were allowed to speak. Couldn’t possibly came the reply, they have plenty of opportunity elsewhere. When I asked that they come to the next meeting to speak as we enquired further, I was told maybe and that the decision would be made in good time. Well they were except no-one told the residents. As it happened they had found out about the meeting themselves and come along. We heard from the officers and then heard from the residents about the problems that they had to face day in and day out.
I still am not sure what we acheived. We had two sessions with officers listening to solutions to noise problems and only then did we get to ask the residents what the problem was.
Apparently Kimpton Centre was not designed to move materials around. Yet it happens and this is what causes the noise. We were told that other state of the art recycle centres had split-levels. Yet this is how the previous Oldfields Road site had until is was flogged off to Tescos and a smaller site constructed. It seems clear that this administration still treat members of the public as the enemy paying lip service to consultation. We are here to represent residents by asking searching questions not ticking Government boxes whilst pushing away those people who look to us for answers.
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by Paul Scully | Feb 7, 2008 | News |
The LibDem Council have just completed their six-week consultation on this year’s budget. This meaningless exercise managed just 22 responses from the 180,000 residents of the Borough.
In order to show that people were interested in what tax they paid, I was joined by four colleagues on Sutton High Street and obtained 26 responses in a mere ten minutes.
This equates to one ten-thousandth of the population and our level of Council tax hinges on this. The Council needs to consult properly or give up the pretence. If the LibDem Councillors had just taken one form each home to get a neighbour to complete it, they would have got a better response.
I addressed the Council Executive (the inner LibDem Cabinet) on Monday, insisting that they stop demeaning the idea of consultation by either doing it properly or not at all. The questions were in the mould of American-style “push polling” which is not interested in your answers but passing on political messages within the question. Take this one for example: “Do you agree that any increase in council tax should be kept below the Government’s national limit of 5% even though the grant the council is receiving from the government does not cover inflation?” I was surprised that 8% of respondents answered no to this. Firstly because, I find it amazing that anyone would want to see a rise of more than 5% and secondly because this equates to 1.76 people which makes me question who the 0.76 of a person was.
We go through this dance each year, with the LibDem Council buttering us up for another above-inflation increase. The budget that has just been consulted on, shows a Council Tax increase of 4.6%. If the increase comes in any lower than this, whilst extremely welcome, it will mean that the consultation was carried out on a totally different budget. Not that the vacuous questioning contained in the questionnaire would have to be changed, just the background papers.
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by Paul Scully | Feb 3, 2008 | News |
Residents in Cheam were shocked and disappointed to read that Cheam Baths may be earmarked for closure by the LibDem Council as part of their leisure centre strategy. Instead, residents and schoolchildren who want to use the second most popular centre in the Borough will have to travel to Sutton or even out of Borough to Merton and Epsom.
At a recent Council meeting Graham Tope, LibDem spokesman for Leisure, justified the significant recent price hikes but refused to give a cast-iron guarantee that the centre would be retained. John Kennedy said in response that Lord Tope has gone from “the Cardinal Wolsey of the LibDems to the Gordon Brittas of Leisure in Sutton.”
Jonathan Pritchard, Conservative candidate for the upcoming Cheam By-election said afterwards “Local people want local leisure services, they don’t want to be forced to travel across the borough or to neighbouring boroughs. The threat looming over Cheam Baths will particularly impact on local residents, Cheam schools and the leisure centre staff. The Council needs to be up-front about this instead of claiming they simply don’t know.”
Cheam Leisure Centre has the second highest footfall of all the Leisure Centres in Sutton behind Westcroft. Both centres need a lot of money spending on them to bring them up to scratch but the LibDems seem to be heading for the nuclear option by replacing them with a single centre in the middle of Sutton town centre. The consultant’s report has been sat on a desk since December and any decision has been pushed ever further back to Easter. This could have a significant effect on Carshalton as well as Cheam.
