It is an interesting co-incidence that the level of Babergh’s estimated budget shortfall for the 2012/13 financial year is around the same level as the amount of money that would have been saved by the full constitutional merger of the Council with Mid Suffolk.
Of course the merger would not have taken place until 2013/14, but had the associated savings been on the horizon, it would have been easier, I think, to justify taking some money out of our rather depleted reserves, or using the new homes bonus money recently received from the Government to make up next year’s shortfall.
As readers will remember a good deal of misinformation about the proposed merger was put about by Liberal Democrat and Labour politicians ahead of the poll, and as a result, and as predicted, we now have to look elsewhere to ‘plug the gap’, as John Sayers so elegantly put it in the Suffolk Free Press this week.
Since we are doing all we can with regard to generating savings from integration with Mid Suffolk (stopping short of a full merger), and since these savings will not be sufficient to produce a balanced budget, we are having to look elsewhere for funds.
And this brings us to the knotty problem of short term car parking charges.
One of the misleading statements put about before the poll in May was that, were the merger to go ahead, car parking charges would be inevitable since some areas of Mid Suffolk already levy them. I wrote at the time* that, due to the urgent need to find savings, failure to merge would be more likely to herald their introduction. This may well prove to be the case.
At present we are looking at all the options (of which there are not many, and all unpleasant).
*See post for 1st May this year ‘A daft claim from the Liberal Democrats’
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