| Topic: | £500+ SPENDING. Sitting comfortably??? | |
| Posted by: | George Knox | |
| Date/Time: | 17/02/11 23:36:00 |
| Arthur. The revised Medium term financial strategy page 40 dated Feb 2011 shows redundancy costs over the term of this administration as being in the order of £4.3M. In Regeneration and Housing most of the redundancy of about 0.5M seems to be projected for this year. The department which takes half the total hit is Children & Adults. This document goes before Council soon. God knows why they want an army of staff involved in spending around £15M on a new car park in Southall and three service centres instead of keeping the services in central Ealing. You would have thought that Labour would be more interested in looking after children and adults and keeping more of the staff in that department. How can a nice to have be justified during a recession? I speculate that Bell got stitched up by Sharma for the car park while he sits in Sharma’s office doing research rather than working full time for the residents of the whole borough. Or they could be less harsh on the Voluntary grant cut backs knowing as was confirmed today by Iain Duncan Smith that there will be many more unemployed and so needing support from the third sector and indeed the Councils. And they also want to limit the charity relief enjoyed by charity shops. Against Corporate Finance there is an entry: “ Leadership Incentive Programme - Removal of the the Leadership Incentive Plan, which was introduced to help with the recruitment and retention of Directors, making part of their remuneration subject to performance achievement on both a corporate and individual basis.” Sounds interesting. Revenue expenditure for Ward forums to come down by 25%. That will keep us happy. Housing Benefit processing will get interesting. There will be an appointment based face to face system. Some applicant queues will get longer. Some assessments will be risk based. That means checking of documentation won’t always be so vigorous. Take your cheque book with you after death as burial fees going up. Take a trowel with you to ensure that holes in the road are 30mm deep instead of 25mm. Otherwise they won’t rush to repair the hole for grannies. Incredibly they think they will save £2M by inflicting this horror upon us. Gully cleansing I think I read is twice a year. Now it will be on demand. Better warn the insurance companies. As for park rangers. They envisage savings of about £5M. We only have 837 hectares (2068 acres) of parks and recreation grounds. The number of Councillors meeting will reduce so we get less governance. It’s bad enough anyway. What they should do is reduce the allowances across the board. The savings would be similar. Interestingly I have just discovered (years too late) that they will rationalise the Stationery and Printing budget referred in earlier in this thread. There is a great deal more in this document listing cut backs – some are huge. The above are just snips of information. However nowhere in this wretched wretched document did I see a regular theme developing which steps towards sharing services with other Councils. For me that is gross negligence in the face of legislation which imposes a duty to manage a Council’s finances and services prudently. It is also ideology on the part of this pathetic administration which has turned its back on Socialist values to refuse to join in with other Councils to deliver services. Leader Councillor Julian Bell should hang his head in shame. |