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Local authority budget-setting: B&NES faces vital choices Local authorities are about to set their yearly budgets. Tory B&NES Council faces important choices
Desperate to mask their shortcomings, Conservative councillors will pretend the Government ‘underfunds’ B&NES. It’s nonsense. This is the thirteenth straight year that councils are getting above-inflation increases in Government grant – up £1.5 million for B&NES this year alone.
B&NES will complain other local authorities get more Government money than them but this overlooks key facts.
In areas like Bristol, a much greater proportion of households are exempt from Council Tax - because of higher unemployment, for example. In relatively affluent B&NES - where unemployment fortunately remains comparatively low - a much higher proportion of households pay full Council Tax on properties that are on average more valuable. This provides B&NES with huge funds.
Justice demands that Government takes locally-raised Council Taxes into account. To ignore this would benefit councils in richer districts, to the detriment of the poorest and most socially deprived people who live in areas where the Council Taxes raised are proportionately lower. Not to do this would be morally wrong – just as Tory plans to cut Inheritance Tax for the wealthiest 3000 millionaire families, while ordinary people face tax hikes, is morally wrong.
Imagine you could set B&NES’ budget. You’d note at Christmas B&NES started sending out ‘at risk of redundancy’ notices to its lower paid workers. But you’d find B&NES is top-heavy with bosses compared to similar councils. Unbelievably, since 2007, the number of managers on £50,000-plus salaries in Conservative B&NES Council has risen by 80 per cent. Hardly the efficiency savings the Government expects of councils.
B&NES also employ a £170,000 a year Chief Executive who’s had successive pay rises of nearly £30,000 since the Tories took control – notoriously the same period when Tory councillors decided to introduce car parking charges for people with disabilities. And B&NES spend £40,000 each year on council tax funded glossy newsletters proclaiming how great they are – oh, there’s also the £300,000 in total on P.R. staff and publications.
You’d have a challenge justifying all this as ‘essential’ to fellow Chew Valley Council Tax payers who’d rather their communities’ priorities were put first: roads being gritted in the snow, for example, potholes fixed, and so on.
B&NES gets above inflation funding from Government, plus all our Council Taxes. It should be performing, much better – and we deserve better. Councillors must concentrate on our every day priorities, not their excesses we can ill afford. Written for the Chew Valley Gazette February 2010
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