Liberal Democrat group leader Cllr Lucy Nethsingha responds to the Conservative group’s budget proposals
Cambridgeshire County Council meets today to set the council budget for the coming financial year.
The session is introduced by URC minister Nigel Uden, who recounts the biblical story of the wisdom of Solomon – the two women disputing ownership of a baby, and Solomon revealing the real mother by proposing to cut the child in half. Why it’s assumed that only its parent would object to the bisecting of an infant has always puzzled me.
The council notes the deaths of a former Labour councillor, Christine Carter from Cherry Hinton, and a member of the council’s schools forum, Alan Rodger.
The member of the public who has asked a written question about continued access to a shortcut through the Shire Hall site isn’t here to put it. The chairman of the council himself asks a pre-arranged question about the matter to the chairman of the relevant committee. This is designed to give the committee chairman the opportunity to make very disparaging remarks about the local Labour county councillors for the area, and under the council’s rules of procedure the councillors who have been attacked aren’t allowed to respond or defend themselves. It’s going to be that kind of a grubby day.
There are no petitions, so it’s on to the next item of business, changes to the council’s constitution. These are a bit of a ragbag, firstly setting in stone the ludicrous process the council uses to consider budgets like today’s, and secondly about how delegation of decisions to officers is managed. My colleague Cllr David Jenkins demolishes the proposal for budget debates: he says (rightly) that it’s incompatible with the committee system the council operates, gives less time for the ruling group’s budget proposals to be properly scrutinised, gives officers a mandate which is incompatible with their roles, and gives no opportunity to use amendments to the budget to add value to the decision making process. But the proposal is steamrollered through anyway.
So it’s on to the budget. Last year the Conservatives changed the budget debate process to the one which is being used again today and which has now been cemented into the council’s constitution. Basically it turns the process of budget debate into a game of rock, scissors, paper. The ruling group has overseen the production by officers of a pretend budget over the last few months. All political groups, including the Conservatives running the council, then submit budget amendments about a week before the full council meeting. This is the first time the groups see each other’s budgets; there’s no chance to change them, and no chance to consider them in committee as happens in normal committee-run councils, before they come to the budget meeting.
The Leader of the Council proposes the pretend budget. Then he proposes the real Conservative budget, as an amendment to the budget he proposed immediately beforehand. Then the other groups propose their amendments as amendments to the Conservative amendment. The other groups are defeated, the real Conservative budget is voted through, and then there’s a victory lap of triumphalist speeches by the Conservative chairmen of all the committees.
The three budget amendments are here:
The Conservative amendment puts up council tax by 1.59 per cent, plus 2 per cent for adult social care. This is less than the maximum allowed by the Government. The maximum increase is 1.99 per cent plus the 2 per cent for adult social care. The difference is 11p per week per household in a Band D home; and it’s a difference that will live with us and be multiplied every year forever. I point out that between 2016 and 2019, by not setting the maximum council tax expected by the Government, the council gave up a cumulative total of £34,654,766 which could have been spent on public services. As a result many residents – recipients of care, families in need, parents sending children to sixth form on the bus – pay far more in extra charges and lost services, than they would have in council tax.
The Conservative budget sets up a climate change fund by borrowing more, and an unexplained £5 million fund for community capital schemes. It also tells us that it expects the Government to provide £6.336 million for potholes, and that it will borrow the money in that expectation. And it puts £200,000 more into the Local Highways Initiative scheme, which began with the intention of involving parishes in putting forward their own solutions (and at least 10 per cent of the money) to highways issues in their communities, but which has evolved into a bureaucratic system in need of serious review and reform.
The Liberal Democrat budget is next. We’ve proposed a number of sensible things including:
- Savings by streamlining committees, cutting extravagant ‘special responsibility allowances’ for councillors, and axing the four pointless ‘area champion’ councillor roles at £5,000 each
- More spending on youth services
- More money for the ‘junior travel ambassadors’ scheme in schools
- A hardship fund for those who will be badly affected by the council’s new and higher charges for aspects of adult social care
- More money for local highways officers to do the small repair jobs to road surfaces, verges, white lines and so on
- A trial exercise to see whether the council could join almost everywhere else in the country, and remove parking enforcement from the police and hand it over to local councils
- Moving £10 million from the council’s Transformation budget to a dedicated climate change fund, which could be accessed quickly by officers as soon as an environmental project is ready to go (and unlike the Conservatives’ fund won’t be paid for by additional borrowing)
After that has all been defeated, it’s the Labour budget. This removes a lot of savings from the existing budget, and takes a lot of one-off money to plug the gap. The trouble is, the gap will only open up again, and wider, next year, and the one-off money has gone. Even worse, they’ve not included a penny in their budget for the climate change work we’ve all agreed urgently needs doing. That’s defeated too.
With a budget voted through, the meeting moves on to questions to the council’s representatives on the Mayor’s Combined Authority. A Labour councillor asks about the recent bizarre motion to the Combined Authority Board from two Conservative council leaders, banning the Combined Authority from meeting in Cambridge. Fortunately it had been amended by another Conservative councillor and the resulting decision was slightly less ludicrous – and allowed the Combined Authority to meet in Cambridge half as often as it used to.
With no written questions from councillors, we wrap up at about 2:30PM. We repair to our group room for a buffet lunch one of our group members has kindly organised, and to raise our collective eyebrows at what passes for democracy in Cambridgeshire.