One area that is going to do very, very much worse under Labour over the next few years is capital spending in parks.
Labour’s budget document talks about them putting in a paltry £1 million over the next four years. To give you some idea how little this is the Conservatives allocated £4.8 million of your money to the parks this year alone. Labour are hoping that you will think that the current good state of our parks is down to them. Unfortunately by 2014 the parks will look very poor.
As I blogged yesterday one of the key constraints on this administration, and the previous one, is the burgeoning population and the consequent increase in demand for primary school places. The scope for any additional capital spending is therefore very small and needs to be considered very carefully.
If you listened to Labour politicians you might think that the previous administration had allocated nothing to internal IT upgrades in recent years. In fact in the last year the old administration had allocated £1.5 million to upgrade the security of the council’s IT and to upgrade the council’s PCs to Windows XP.
In the headlines of the budget report the council talked about spending £3.6 million on replacement of PCs, servers and applications to support the efficiency needs of the Council. This figure does not include the additional £3 million put into IT by the council in July of last year. So the total for this programme is £6.6 million. Add in the £1 million required to fit more people into Perceval House and the £8.7 million (net of capital receipts) to build new council offices and you can see that the council is spending out big time on itself – £16.3 million. This figure is far bigger than any other capital allocation the new administration has made outside schools.
The new council administration looks like it is in favour of investing in the council itself rather than the assets that residents use such as roads, parks and libraries.
It is worth understanding one of the major constraints on Ealing’s capital spending – the burgeoning population in our schools. The previous Conservative administration made financial provision for 16 permanent additional forms of entry in our primary schools and 9 temporary forms. The total allocated by the end of our time last year was £71.4 million.
Getting these numbers right is a very tough judgement call and this year the new Labour administration has had to put an additional £45 million aside for an additional 8 forms of entry and more temporary places.
This will continue to be a huge issue for the borough and will roll through to secondary provision and be a significant constraint on what any administration can do on the capital side.
In today’s Guardian Labour’s most senior local government bod, Sir Jeremy Beecham no less, decries the council tax freeze achieved by the coalition government saying:
A freeze builds up financial trouble for the future …
This is the mindset of the lifelong local government functionary who has been highly paid all of his life to merely add up all of the costs in his organisation and pass them on to the public. The rest of us have to deal with financial trouble, trim costs, do things differently, re-prioritise, stop doing old stuff and start doing new stuff all of the time. It is high time that Beecham and his crowd learnt the discipline of not gouging the public year after year.
It is a stunning achievement by the government that not one council in all of England has dared to raise council tax. Under 13 years of Labour the average council tax across the country doubled.
In Ealing it means that council tax was frozen for two years by the Tory local government and for a third year by the coalition government who have given Ealing £3.1 million a year for four years to pay for the freeze.
One of the minor announcements in George Osborne’s budget on Wednesday was an additional £100 million to fix potholes in England on top of £100 million already allocated. Figures published by the Department of Transport yesterday, here, indicate that Ealing will get £323K.
We wait in vain for the council press release.
A major aspect of the capital budget is spending on our roads. Over the course of twelve years of the previous Labour administration the council spent about £12 million. By 2006 the borough’s roads were shockingly bad. In four years the all too short-lived Tory administration allocated £25.5 million of your money to fixing the roads outside your house. We thought that was a good use of your money and we spent twice as much as Labour in one third of the time. The graph below is – graphic!
Labour has always been more interested on spending your money on its own priorities. In the early noughties it was the £61.3 million Response programme. So much for the past. What about the future?
In the next four years Labour propose to spend £11.7 million on the roads. At least they have not gone back to their previous atrocious spending levels but it is a 54% cut, sound familiar? Yes.
As well as halving road spending Labour are back in the business of building council offices, £8.7 million net on three new council offices. Truly we are back to the future.
The Labour council has kicked off a consultation today on closing four libraries plus the mobile library. One of their justifications is that some of them need some money spending on them: Hanwell (£1,106,400), mobile library (£150,000) and Perivale (£527,500). Northfield library is recently refurbished and Northolt Leisure Centre is brand new. Labour seem intent on spending £5.5 million on a car park but libraries can close. The capital argument is just unsustainable. Labour is making the wrong choice here.
Labour’s revenue argument is also rubbish. The main way people use libraries is to borrow books. Cost per book has to be the key metric of how efficient and well used a library is. The council’s own figures below show how well used our libraries are.
Northfield, Northolt Leisure Centre and Perivale are three of the borough’s most efficient libraries. Labour’s revenue argument stinks too.
There is no mention in Labour’s consultation document and questionnaire of back office and management costs. That’s the place to look for savings. Watch this movie.
Labour really do believe that if they repeat a lie often enough people will accept it as the truth. Cutting your policing contribution by 34% and trying to make it something else is plain dishonest.
“A lie told often enough becomes truth” – Vladimir Lenin
Labour’s Cllr Mahfouz is frantically tweeting through the cabinet meeting that is going on right now. These tweets are real gems and a total load of cobblers. When I wrote earlier this month that Labour had reduced the policing contribution that the borough makes by 25% this was an underestimate! Although the budget report shows it going down 25% from £1 million to £750K the actual figure is now going to be £660K as they have decided to raid this budget to spend £90K on beefing up the noise nuisance team. This may well be a good thing but it is a bit dishonest to take it from the police budget and not mention it. Meanwhile the policing cut is 34%.
The current team comprises an inspector, two sergeants and 40 PCSOs. We will have a team comprising an inspector, 9 PCs and 9 PCSOs. I am sure that Labour will tell us that PCs are better than PCSOs but they cannot hide the fact that they have taken 34% out and reduced numbers from 43 to 19. It looks like they intend to make some 60 council staff wear uniforms so that they can make a spurious claim to have increased the number of uniformed officers.
PCSOs have been unfairly derided for being plastic policemen. Now Ealing is going to have paper policemen.
You can see the cabinet paper here. I do feel sorry for the officer Susan Parsonage, Director of Safer Communities, who had to put her name to this nonsense.
One of the largest items on the capital side of the budget is an £8.7 million allocation for “Building of new service centres in Acton, Greenford and Southall”. There is no further information. As we shall see the council’s capital spending is restricted by what we can afford but also by the requirement to prioritise building enough primary school places to cope with our burgeoning population. This was a constraint that the Tories had to live with for four years and it will constrain Labour too. With such little room for manoeuvre, why is Labour prioritising council offices?
There is a great case I think for the Acton regeneration scheme, taking in as it does a wide range of dilapidated public buildings that dominate the centre of Acton. If there is a need for some council offices as a part of that then this may be justified but I can’t help thinking that the Acton regeneration project will be simpler, safer, cheaper and more deliverable if any standard office space required in Acton is procured separately.
The case for Greenford and Southall is very hard to make in the current circumstances. Shiny new council offices or investment in parks? Shiny new offices or a better road outside your house? Shiny new offices or buildings to support the voluntary sector? Labour’s inclination seems to be to look after its own rather than residents.
In order to understand what Labour are doing you need to understand the officer-led Property Strategy, see here. The Property Strategy gobbles up day centres, community centres, school and nursery sites and small car parks in its voracious maw and spews out three council offices. The £8.7 million allocation in the budget is only a net figure. The gross cost of these three hubs, a concept thrown out by the Tories in 2006, is more like £30 million.
More shiny baubles? Oh yes. Don’t forget that these are the same people that brought you the £61.3 million Response programme.
Phil Taylor 