Thanet Council has produced a report concerning the state of its budget, its pretty detailed and there's plenty for me as shadow spokesperson to question later, such as the projected loss on green waste collection, and where precisely the £360k for unplanned replacement at the Council offices windows is coming from, and the extra £100k dredging costs.
But if I’ve got it right, we started the year needing to find savings of £2M to balance the budget, and now 3 months in, we are instead 544K overspent and that does not allow fully for rising energy costs, pay rises or increased interest rates.
To add to the problem council has seen a rise in its electricity charges of 63% so far this year and has also been hit by the rising cost of fuel, with a range of vehicles used by the council to provide essential front line services, including refuse trucks, street cleaning machines and ride on mowers.
The price of wheeled bins, which the council is in the process of rolling out to another 8,000 homes across the district, has also gone up by 17%, because they are made from oil based products.
At the same time, income into the council in some areas is starting to drop, with land charge searches being particularly badly hit.
All thismeans that this budget overspend could increase, as inflation continues to rise. The Cabinet say that a series of measures to achieve spending cuts are now being drawn up by officers and are due to go before the September meeting of Cabinet.
There is very little in this report about how we are going to tackle this other than a vague reference to budget managers indentifying savings (they won’t) or Corporate Plan aims being cut. The question surely for the Tory Cabinet, is the one they consistently duck. Given the hole they have got us in, what things are not a priority? Which services are they going to cut?
Stella Artwat
7 hours ago
4 comments:
Well the Turner Centre could be knocked on the head for a start!
I'm sure the council will get their budget sorted..... Probably by selling off all these assets like Albion house etc
It would seem to me that if the council were a real business it would have gone bust years ago!
Every year my Council Tax goes up but I don't really see anything for it!
Maybe Im wrong, but didnt Labour propose an alternate budget which would have had an immediate shortfall and would have finished with a serious shortfall unless 10% of staffing costs could be found?
Please can Labour give some indication as to how their budget would have avoided the situation you are describing now in your article above?
I'm a bit confused about just why the wheely bins cost more can't they just use the ones piled up inside the old Sally Line carpark and if that fails just use the cannons stored there to fire the rubbish out to sea
The question that matters most to guys like me is how much is it going to cost? How great is the drop in council services quality likely to be, how much more will my tax be and how hard will the council be looking to shake off benefits claimants?
On that last point it has been increasingly aggressive to the point of insolence in order to try to invalidate claims. One gent I know wrote everything they needed to know on a single sheet of A4 and they acknowledged that they did not need any more information but would not accept the document because it was not "signed". Another I spoke to said he had his tax benefits stopped because he was unable to prove his child was now in school rather than in nursery even though this has been the case for a number of years.
That's where the savings are trying to be made and they have been attempted with increasing urgency for the last three years. Technically they have not broken the "rules" as such but they have become very quick to apply the letter of law such that customer service does not exist in any meaningful way.
I'm just pleased that someone has spoken up and confirmed my statement that the council budget is in a dire state.
My question to you, your party and to every other councilor - how will you protect Thanet's poorest families from the budget problems? They can not get funding to seek legal address against the council and are the least likely to vote so they are often the ones that get dumped on first. I am watching you all for an answer.
Post a Comment