Reflections on Thursday's budget

I have now caught up with everything else sufficiently to write a few words about last week’s budget.

As the Cabinet Member for Resource Management it fell to me to start the debate on Thursday afternoon and also to bring it to a close.

It is well known to readers of this website that the Conservative administration at the County Council has to prepare a budget in the face of unprecedented cuts from the Government.  This is not easy, but we have managed to produce a plan for 2015/16 which makes savings of £38m or so without seriously damaging front line services.  If you are interested in knowing how we expect to do this, you can do no better than read the budget paper on the County Council’s website. 

Suffice it to say that we are embarking on a series of transformation programmes which will redesign services and at the same time save costs and that council tax will be frozen for the fifth year in a row..

Inevitably the various opposition parties did not agree with our proposals, but their reasons differed somewhat.

Labour tabled an amendment which suggested that we should not try fully to bridge the budget gap at all.  We should reverse what they called ‘cuts’ (but what we see as ‘savings’) and should make up the £12m resulting shortfall in the finances by raiding the council’s reserves.  This idea might have had some merit were we to have sufficient free reserves to cover not just next year’s deficit, but the next several years.  The thing is however that we do not.  Free reserves of around £30m can be compared with an expected budget shortfall of £120m or so in the next three years, and of course, once the reserves are spent they are gone.

  

A lazy and financially illiterate response then, but Labour is not in an easy position.  Arguably the financial woes of the country can be laid at their door, and they know as well as we do that, given the council’s statutory obligations, there is little room to manoeuvre.  It would have been more honest perhaps to shrug off their reputation for inflation busting council tax increases and fund their suggestions from an increase in council tax. An alternative might have been to try to find some other area of the council’s activity to cut back instead

The wording of the amendment, combined with their opening rhetoric, revealed some confusion about the concept of what actually constitutes a reserve, and it was plain that Labour has no real grasp of what they were suggesting.  For a party intent on restoring its reputation for financial competence ahead of the General Election in May, this was not a good way to proceed.

The Liberal Democrats’ reasons for opposing the proposals were, as usual, as varied as the number of Liberal Democrats in the chamber.

UKIP stated that they would oppose the budget because it believed that we are the lackeys of Westminster, and ought to ‘fight back’ against cuts more robustly.  They seem to have failed to notice that we are actually Conservatives, and, with George Osborne, the Chancellor, believe that financial restraint is essential if Britain’s economy is to have a sustainable future.

Only one of our two Green Members turned up.  He said he felt that Labour’s amendment did not go far enough and that he would not vote for it.  I suspect that he did vote against the budget as a whole however.  Presumably the Greens think that we should take the first steps towards insolvency by ignoring the fact that, without action, expenditure will exceed our income next year by £38.2m.  But then, in what is gradually being revealed as their green on the outside and red in the middle ‘watermelon world’, all property is in any case theft, and all government will ultimately wither away.

The long shadow of the General Election was never very far away.  At one stage the Leader of the Labour Party suggested that all ex bankers on the Conservative benches were ‘multi millionaires’ and a UKipper suggested that all the Council’s problems would be solved if we left the EU.

The budget was passed relatively easily in the end.  Members on our own side made some well-considered speeches and demonstrated a level of sanity that was sadly lacking across the way.