The government and the national media are crowing about the “good news” regarding low council tax rises — expected to average at around 3% across the UK as a whole. Locally however, councillors and staff having to implement wide-ranging service cuts to keep rises below the government’s five per cent cap are far from happy.
Responding to news of the planned cuts to local Citizens Advice Bureaux, The Dukes and the closure of public toilets (see news stories here and here), past of a £1.7 million savings package drawn up fro full Council approval in March, Green councillor Jon Barry notes Greens in Cabinet voted against the CAB cash cuts — and made it clear to virtual-lancaster that the budget cuts are an inevitable consequence of the council’s poor finances beset by a number of problems and additional costs.
“The council’s finances have been in a disastrous position all of this year,” he revealed. “There are several reasons, but these include loss of interest from the £6m invested in Iceland, concessionary fares (free travel for pensioners) costing hundreds of thousands more than the money given by the government and a rent review on the market which put the rent that the council pays the owners up and kindly backdated it, costing several hundred thousand more.”
As a result, the Council have had to make £1.7m of cuts from about last November. “The Tory leader of the Council resigned because he couldn’t sort out the budget – so it was left to the rest of us to stop the city going bankrupt,” Barry reveals. “It really was that serious.
“We have had to do lots of things that we would rather not do and many of them at too short notice because the budget wasn’t worked on early enough by the person who was supposed to be doing it.
More problems ahead
The problems facing Lancaster City Council are far from over, even with these proposed cuts. virtual-lancaster understands the LCC will have to find some two million pounds in savings next year on top of the £1.7 million in savings it has to make now.
“The budget for next year is also dire and we haven’t even got round to the £6m Iceland money yet,” Barry admits. Lancaster City Council had £6 million saved with three Icelandic banks – Landsbanki, Glitnir and Kaupthing – and the Governmentt has allowed the Council a year’s grace in accounting for it.
Faced with a combination of bad finacne news, the Council had no choice but to shrink in terms of its support services and restructure many of its other services. “Doing this through things like early retirement etc is expensive,” says Barry. “We have a reserve set aside (about £900,000) to do this.
“If we spent this reserve on other things then we would not be able to sort out next year’s budget and the cuts would be even worse. For example, early retiring a service head or director can cost £200-300k on pension contributions, severance etc. So even £900k doesn’t go far.
Taking Responsibilty
“As far as my position on cabinet is concerned, I could have just opposed every cut and tried to make myself ‘popular’,” Barry reveals of his own views on the cuts. “However, I’m afraid this is not how I’m made. I feel that I have to play my part and take responsibility for getting the Council’s finances back on track. This is the only thing that will work in the medium term.”
There is some good news. “We have been making progress in reducing the Council’s energy bills and saving money (and CO2) there. Salt Ayre Leisure Centre uses more energy than all of the other Council buildings put together and a number of steps have been put in place recently to reduce energy useage there. We will be continuing with this and also doing the same things to the Town Halls in the coming year.”
Barry stresses that he realizes things could have been done better, such as the decision to close local public toilets, which has now been “called in” for scrutiny. “Everything would have been much easier if we had done this last summer rather than bringing it in as a last minute thing,” the councillor admits. “Having said that, we have set aside 20k for alternative provision (though I’m assuming some of that will be to employ somebody to sort out the ‘Richmond’ scheme).
“I am hoping that we can ‘open’ more toilets than we close – and give a bit of a boost to some flagging rural businesses at the same time. Anyway, I hope so and I’ll be putting effort into trying to ensure that it works.”
Overall, councillors of every political hue can fight each individual bit of the budget, “but then we have the choice when all the bits are put together (some of which we will agree with and some we won’t!) of voting for the whole package or not,” says Jon, who recalls with vivid detail that thrashing out the budget at Cabinet as it currently stands toook over eight hours. “We did at cabinet, because apart from Citizens Advice Bureaux, it could have been a lot worse and we did need to set a budget of some sort.”
Addressing huge concerns about the budget cuts for local Citizens Advice Bureaux (see news story), the argument put forward for the cut will be that Council want the two CABs to merge and reduce management costs. Barry says the CABs are apparently currently in merger talks.” The argument against this is that those savings might not be possible,” opines Barry, “and in a recession, the CABs have a lot more work to do and are more needed.”
• Full council will meet on 4th March where the cuts and budget changes will be finalised. The County Council will decide its funding levels for bodies such as The Dukes, which it co-funds with other organisations, on 19 March.
• The Citizens Advice Bureaux are asking everybody to write to their local councillors and MPs and to sign a petition online in support of maintaining their funding at www.ipetitions.com/petition/Save_CAB/index.html. Signatures are needed by 2nd March, so that it can be sent to all councillors before their final meeting.
• Click Here for Local Councillor Information on the City Council web site. You can also write to local councillors to let them know what you think via www.writetothem.com. Please note, we’re aware many local councillors access to their Council e-mail is erratic: real world letters will have more impact, even if they’re just postcards.