Category: Ealing and Northfield

Another area of council spending which has had a relatively easy time is the communications budget of £1,474K. You might think this would be an electorally popular cut to make and it certainly counts in the backoffice category rather than the frontline.

The cuts here have been a little opaque and in fact were stated twice and then withdrawn after I pointed it out to the chief executive. Labour will be taking out £250K or 17% from this budget – not 50% then like the frontline areas that Labour is targeting.

You can see why the Labour team want a buffer of comms people around them but this really was the time to change the council’s approach to comms. Rather than paying a team to mould the message we should simply be giving the portfolio holders’ mobile numbers to the press and letting them get on with it. I think that residents are past wanting to pay to help councillors look good. If they can’t handle the press, let’s find out.

In Northfield ward we are in awe of our envirocrime officer. He does a great job up to and including getting a criminal gang of fly-tippers put in jail. Up until now there has been a team of 23 envirocrime officers, one for each ward. This one-to-one correspondence between ward and staff has allowed them to form excellent working relationships with the police Safer Neighbourhood teams and the ward councillors, at least that is how it works in our ward I would assume it works similarly in the others unless something is badly wrong.

The original proposal for changes in this area involved reducing this team from 23 to 12 officers, a reduction of 48% in headcount terms. After much complaint, not least from Tory group, an extra officer has been put back in to take the group back 13. This still represents a cut in headcount terms of 43% and compares very poorly with the cut proposed in service heads of only 9%, see here, and the cut in facility time of only 20%, see here. Yet again we see a mismatch between the Labour administration’s priorities and residents’.

One of the cuts that the Labour administration is making in the back office is in what is called union facility time. This is a legal entitlement for union organisers to use work time to organise. In many organisations it is considered more efficient if a few people do this full-time rather than many do it part-time. In Ealing the budget for this is £250K per annum this year. This is to be cut by 20% or £50K, but not the next financial year 2011/2, the year after.

When compared to frontline cuts of 50% in many areas valued by residents it seems strange indeed that union facility time should only be cut by 20% and that this should be delayed until the year after next. It seems to me that this is another example of Labour having the wrong priorities.

One of the areas that the government has asked councils to look at is the cost of senior management. In 2009/10 Ealing spent £9.7 million on the 98 people who comprise its top three layers of management. (See answers to questions 40-42 asked by Cllr Stacey at October council here). Roughly speaking we have 100 people who cost us £100K each, a total of £10 million.

The top two layers of the management structure comprises 21 people and cost £2.9 million per annum. There are plans in the budget to reduce this spend by 30% and save £0.9 million. It has to be said that these plans are backloaded and see the savings delayed for a year and then stretched out over three years. This is not the way to do it. It should have been done on Friday May 7th 2010 and not left to run until 2014. This cut does not affect the layer below, the 77 service heads.

At the Overview and Scrutiny Committee meeting on 2nd December where we looked at the budget I challenged the council’s chief executive as to why we were seeing 50% cuts in some frontline services whilst management costs were largely unchanged. He explained that only 7 out of 77 service heads had so far been put at risk as a result of the current proposals. He also made reference to future changes to the management structure.

The saving so far banked from the service heads is only 9% in headcount terms compared to the 50% cuts we are seeing in some frontline services valued by residents such as park rangers, envirocrime officers and community centre staff.

On top of the senior management saving of £0.9 million being delayed there is a missing saving of £1.4 million here related to the service head layer of the council, 21% of the £6.8 million cost of the service heads. Whilst frontline cuts are frontloaded the cuts that residents might like to see are delayed or simply not even identified. Yet again we get the sense that residents’ priorities are not at the top of the list.

If you are going to call your opposition to account on numbers you need to at least understand your own budget. In this press release Labour accuses the Tories of making unfunded promises.

I am sure that our leader will be able to give Labour chapter and verse on how he would fund the services he would wish to see continue. My suggestions would be looking at the council’s generous Ts and Cs (worth a minimum of £10 million), shared services (which Labour has barely scratched as they haven’t the wit to push back at officers on this) and senior management costs (£10 million which has been barely touched by Labour). Easy.

They confess to taking £750K out of the police budget but their own budget papers, here, make it clear they are taking out £250K out of £1 million and leaving £750K.

Julian Bell should quit while he is behind. Frighteningly he is in charge.

I will come back to the financial implications of Labour’s decision to put a new car park in Southall in a later posting. Many people think that the decision is hard to justify in terms of user demand let alone anything else. In order to test this I have decided to do some mystery shopping.

As we shop is Sainsburys West Ealing quite regularly I will test how long it takes to drive to Southall and park up at the Herbert Road multi-storey car park (HRMSCP). I have been twice already:

Saturday 5th March, left West Ealing 2:54pm, got parked HRMSCP 3:12pm, 18 minutes including about 3 minutes to drive round car park until I found a space due to someone leaving. 2 disabled bays free on arrival but all other spaces filled. Considering this is totally peak time this was a doddle. The Southall Town Hall junction was pretty horrid in and out but otherwise very easy really.

Monday 7th March, left West Ealing 1:28pm, got parked HRMSCP 1:39pm, 11 minutes overall, over 100 free spaces including 4 disabled, all very easy and low stress except for Southall Town Hall crossroads which are always a trial. But one can vroom around with ease if your engine gives you the right horsepower and save you that office meeting you were late to. If it’s high time to change your car to a swanky new one, worry not for there are many sites which offer the best of the deals. Case in point, check out this Silverado for sale, and tell me there is a better place than that to buy cars.

In 25 days, at the start of April, the rubber will hit the road for our new Labour council when their new budget comes into force. Although they will have been in power for almost a year it is not until the whole budget setting cycle is complete that their priorities and decisions really get to be seen by the public. As I have said before: To govern is to choose.

Many of the decisions in Labour’s first budget, see documents here, would have been made in much the same way by a Conservative council. It is quite clear that central government’s 28% cut in revenue support grant across the board would have forced many of the same unpleasant choices on a Tory administration too. But, there are alternatives which I hope to illustrate over the next 25 days.

One item the Conservative opposition approves of is that Labour is continuing the policy of freezing council tax for a third year. As the opposition leader, Jason Stacey, said in his remarks after the budget setting council:

We do however, welcome the Government grant of £3.1 million to enable the Council Tax to be frozen for the third year, following the two year freeze under the previous Conservative administration, which will help hard pressed families in the borough during this challenging economic time.

Labour’s manifesto promised:

Keeping your council tax low with a freeze in the first year.

After two years of 1.9% from the Tories followed by zero for two years and a further zero from Labour it will be hard to see how council tax can go up by more than the odd percent and still be described as “low”. We hope that we have changed Ealing Labour’s approach to council tax for good.

I noticed a new Ealing blog from Labour supporter Neil Reynolds yesterday, see here. He was commenting on the council budget and thought that it was fair overall.

Neil approvingly pulled out some key points. Rather than simply report on yesterday’s budget setting council or rehash the speech I had prepared on my blog I thought I might respond to Neil instead.

Neil,

Welcome to blogging in Ealing. I would like to comment on the points you raise:

■£66,000,000 cut in funding from central government over the next 10 years.

Apparently £7.3 million of this number is the growth items in Labour’s own budget. In four budgets we put in £40 million of growth. You did not hear us describing this as £40 million of Labour government cuts. The £66 million figure is just nonsense. The actual, real cuts are a fraction of this and tiny compared to the council’s £1 billion plus spending every year (look it up, happy to explain it). For instance, adding £1.5 million to parking charges is no kind of cut.

■A council tax freeze as promised in Labour manifesto.

This freeze is paid for by £3.1 million per annum for four years provided by central government – otherwise council tax would have to go up by 2.5%. This is the 18th year that Ealing has set a council tax (it was the community charge before that!). Labour has set the council tax 13 times in that time. We welcome the first ever freeze from Labour. We froze for two years and kept rises down to 1.9% for two years before that. Practically every London council froze last year and this year. No big deal!

■Allocation of £45,000,000 in the capital budget to provide extra primary school places.

This of course carries on the existing programme which sought to provide the extra places required with high quality classrooms. The council has no choice about providing these places but we are happy that the new administration is extending this programme in the same way that we did. We are concerned that the programme may still not be big enough. The population curve keeps tilting upwards and numbers may well need to be revised again. Watch this space. We shouldn’t be thinking about £5.5 million for a car park in Southall until this question has been bottomed out.

■Money to recruit more social workers to tackle the shortage of front line staff in that area.

You are quite right. £232K added in this area. To put this in context the previous administration put in £4.8 million of growth into childrens services over four years.

■Plans to share services with other London boroughs to improve efficiency.

The only shared services proposal specifically mentioned in the budget is a future, undeveloped proposal in the area of HR. People have been talking about this for years so this is very disappointing. Under the previous Tory administration a joint procurement exercise in adults through the West London Alliance yielded about £1 million in savings. A larger, similar project in the area of childrens seems to have been kicked into the long grass. All the senior Labour team would have been aware over two years ago that there was going to have to be a radical re-structuring of the council. There is no excuse for moving so slowly on this.

■Investment in the council’s computer systems and plans to reduce office space to increase efficiency and provide value for money.

You are talking about £4.6 million of capital spending on these items plus £8.7 million (net, ie not the whole bill) on new offices. So £13.3 million of capital spending on the council machine. This shows somewhat distorted priorities and makes the opposition wonder if this is not a budget for the council officers rather than Ealing residents. Maybe the Labour cabinet are just not bright enough to spot producer interests at work?

■A reduction in the number of senior staff to reduce costs

You may not be aware but answers to questions 40-42 at the October council meeting showed that the council has 98 senior staff who cost £9.7 million a year. At the OSC meeting on 2nd December the chief executive of the council confirmed to me that the current budget proposals involved losing 7 out of 77 of the service head tier of management and none from the other tiers. So a 9% cut in middle management headcount compared to the 50% cuts in frontline services such as envirocrime officers and rangers. Again we see the producer interests at work. The officer class protected.