by Paul Scully | Apr 8, 2009 | News |
A picture of an ostrich just didn’t cut the mustard when writing about the latest on the controversial £8million Sutton Life Centre.
As expected, Sutton’s senior LibDem councillors queued up to sing the praises of the Sutton Life Centre.
It was wonderful to have a library that would be open for longer than the one that it would replace, like the one at the Phoenix Centre in Beddington, without mentioning that many users of that library bemoan the fact that it may be open for longer but it lacks one small thing; books.
It was great that we would have a state of the art centre to teach Junior Citizenship, the silver bullet that would stop our young people getting involved in antisocial behaviour and drugs without recognising that such a course already exists in Sutton at one-third of the proposed charge per pupil.
Sometimes, even I am startled at the detachment of the LibDem administration. The Executive meeting on Monday when this was discussed was one such time. The Life Centre might just work. The 40,000 children that need to come to provide most of the income may arrive by the coachload. People may be chasing each other up the climbing wall to get their turn. Starbucks may start sending their trainee Baristas to the Sutton Life Centre to get experience as cappucino follows moccachino out of the cafe door. Kevin Costner built a baseball field in his farm when told by ghostly voices in ‘Field of Dreams’, “build it and they will come”. He built it, they came, but it was just a film. You cannot play fast and loose with public money. It is not appropriate to say that because we have got £4million from a national grant, we need to bend over backwards to match it at a time of financial turmoil, moving money away from education, adult social services and reserves to fill the gap.
If the project falls short of its income target by 20%, the Council will have to find £95,000 each year to keep the place open. The conditions of the grant mean that if the Council sell the building or change its use in the next twenty years, we may need to pay the £4million back. Councillors always have to balance risk. We are still £5.5million light after taking a Treasury management risk in lending the money to an Icelandic bank. This is a risk too far at the wrong time. The business plan is fanciful at best. In order to find 40,000 children to turn up to pay for the building, a massive proportion of children from South East England will have to come.
According to figures contained in the business plan, there are an average of 33,900 children in each year group in schools within the target area of a 1 hour drive of Sutton. The centre is aimed at Years 6 and 8 meaning a total target market of 67,800. The centre needs 40,000 children to come which is 59% market penetration. In order to do this, the plan only allows for a paltry marketing budget of £5000 and £1300 stationery. This does not stack up well amongst organisations with a touch more experience and know-how as this list showing their percentage of their respective markets shows.
- Starbucks 16%
- Tesco 30%
- Barack Obama 53%
- BBC Radio 54%
- Apple iPod 70%
- Microsoft Windows 88%
Since, the Sutton Life Centre is pitching comfortably above the most popular man on the planet, the assumptions surely need at least a cursory second glance from someone independant and with something approaching a business brain. The G20 won’t be swooping down to the Holiday Inn working how to bail us out if things go awry. Let’s get it right now.
At least the Executive have had the good sense to bring the decision to a meeting of the Full Council before we did. We had our form ready to call-in the decision but it was not needed as the LibDem councillors realised that pushing this through would be one step too far.
The Full Council meeting is on Monday 27th April starting at 7pm. It is held in the Civic Offices, St Nicholas Way, Sutton, SM1 1EA. You are most welcome to come along and see where your money is going. If you use Facebook, you can add your voice by joining the group Unaffordable: Shelve the controversial £8million Sutton Life Centre! and just as importantly, please invite all of your friends to do so. If 3003 people can want Wizard man to switch the Christmas lights on in Sutton, I really hope that a few people are moved enough to try to save a few million quid of taxpayers’ money. The message needs to be sent loud and clear: the public purse, filled with taxpayers’ cash, should not be the plaything of politicians.
![Freeze The Tax – Freeze The Life Centre]()
by Paul Scully | Apr 5, 2009 | News |
You will have received your Council Tax bill by now, showing another inflation-busting increase. Well, we tried. The only part of our bill set by a Conservative, that of the GLA precept, was frozen by Boris. George Osborne, Shadow Chancellor has pledged to give council’s enough money to freeze council tax if they can peg their increases to less than 2.5%. This is a fair partnership between national and local government; you do your bit and we’ll help. Meanwhile, we sought your views and shared them with the ruling administration.
We believe that Sutton could have joined the thirteen other London Boroughs that are freezing or cutting their tax, helping their residents when they need it most. You can see more on why we believe this is possible and how we could have acheived it without any frontline cuts at the website http://www.freezethetax.org.uk/.
Instead, the biggest drain on this coming year’s budget, the £8million Sutton Life Centre is coming up for the go-ahead at tomorrow’s meeting of the Council’s Executive. £4million is coming from a grant from national taxpayers, the other £4million is coming from us directly, here in Sutton. The Council have raided the reserves, taken money originally given to Adult Social Services, delayed repairs to schools and kept unexpected windfalls that you were owed, just to shore up this pet project. I’ve already written about the way that planning was obtained in a hurry. The Executive have had only six days to see the business plan. However, since it only contains six pages of financial information for an operation that is aiming to turnover £3/4million a year, they could come to a conclusion quite quickly.
The clincher is the target market. It is aimed at schoolchildren in years 6 and 8 that are within a 60 minute drive of the site. According to the figures contained within the user profiles in the report, it is safe to say that the Sutton Life Centre needs to attract 60% of the entire population of children in years 6 and 8 living in South London and North Surrey. Not even Bill Gates would attempt market penetration of that kind within a 12 month period. They are helped by the fact that they will stop the existing Junior Citizenship programme thus forcing local schoolchildren to go to the new building or miss out. The fact that the existing scheme costs schools £3 per pupil and the new one £9 per pupil suggests that schools are going to be out of pocket again because of the Local Authority.
The charge of £9 is another optimistic assumption. According to the report, there is one place in the country vaguely comparable situated in Milton Keynes. Sutton’s business plan requires twice the number of visitors paying a higher price simply to break even. I suspect that tomorrow night, the LibDems will be leaving their legacy to the people of Sutton. The likely £95k per year needed to keep the place open with just a 20% shortfall in income will provide 95,000 reasons why not to vote LibDem at the next local elections.
by Paul Scully | Mar 29, 2009 | News |
I came across this video during an idle moment and thought it was worth revisiting as a reminder of another example of the remoteness of the present council administration. It is a clip of the local ITV news from last autumn discussing the changes to school transport for children with Special Educational Needs. In case you weren’t following the story, the change went through, rubberstamped by the LibDem backbenchers at a full meeting of the Council. Autistic children were exempted from the change after some passionate campaigning from affected residents.
The changes are being introduced anytime now. I’m still not convinced that the expected savings will materialise. In the meantime, children and their parents are being put through massive upheaval to their already difficult lives. Rather than fronting up about the fact that this is a cost-cutting exercise, the Lead Councillor claims that the move is greener and will give the children exercise.
by Paul Scully | Mar 27, 2009 | News |
Last year Sutton was 6th in London for having the highest proportion of empty houses. Many of these were private homes. The Local Government Association has called on the Government to cut VAT on refurbishment work to encourage owners to bring them up to scratch and occupied. At the moment, new builds are exempt from VAT but refurbishment is not. A separate campaign, Cut the VAT has more details.
In the meantime, residents have been asking what is happening with the empty property in The Square. There have been security problems over the period whilst it has been empty. It has been earmarked for some residents moving from Orchard Hill in Carshalton. The Primary Care Trust seem to be the sticking point. I hope that they start to accelerate their efforts to rehouse people from Orchard Hill which was due to have been closed down last year. Whilst the delays continue to this major project, Stanley Park High School remains unbuilt, the property above remains empty and some residents remain in unsuitable accommodation.
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by Paul Scully | Mar 3, 2009 | News |
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Recently, I wrote about the LibDem’s frankly odd response to the snow when they cut £20k from the Winter Highways Maintenance Budget, whilst looking out of the window at people sliding around on the ice outside the Civic Offices.
At their Cabinet meeting a few days later, the Lead Councillor scoffed at the Evening Standard and others who had commented on this blinkered approach.
It took a question by Councillor Cliff Carter to finally shame the LibDems into realising that Sutton’s roads had more holes than a slice of Emmenthal. We’ve already got the raised obstructions in speed bumps, the potholes that have formed after the frozen conditions are a result of nature’s way of evening things up a bit. The LibDems were forced into an emergency change in their budget, taking £250k from their contingency fund to fill some of the holes.
Interestingly they have spent all of their contingency in this current year. They haven’t identified any more cash, so watch this space to see if they can last the coming year without scratching around raiding another pot of cash. Either way, it was good work by Cliff to get across the clear message that residents have been saying for the last few weeks.
A picture of an ostrich just didn’t cut the mustard when writing about the latest on the controversial £8million Sutton Life Centre.
