There were two articles in The Sun the other day on public sector pay. One was headed ‘£240k boss search axed’ and was a reference to the fact that the Government has vetoed the proposed salary package for a new Chief Executive of the Audit Commission.

The other much more substantial article was over the LGA’s search for a Director of Communications on £124,000 a year.
(As someone who receives a shilling or two from both organisations I must declare an interest.)

Meanwhile Nick Clegg has been applauded by the Daily Mail for his comments on public sector pensions, calling them ‘gold-plated’ and ‘unfair and unaffordable’.

The standard comparison when it comes to public sector pay is with the salary of the Prime Minister. In the case of the Audit Commission this was debunked on the BBC by leading private sector accountancy commentator Emile Woolf.

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With growing pressure on local Councils to make efficiencies and to live within decreasing means, whilst at the same time preserving front-line services, one could be forgiven for thinking that Council Leaders and Cabinet Members need to be proven miracle workers before getting the job.

This is especially so when the local priorities they have been elected to deliver on are made more difficult by national directives dressed up as policy initiatives and when those initiatives are not properly funded.

Centralisation and control-freakery on the part of Welsh Ministers has been a common theme in these articles however the one c-word they fall down on is consistency. This is best illustrated by what happened in Cardiff recently over school reorganisation.

The Council’s view can be read at http://www.freedomcentral.org.uk/2010/06/our-kids-deserve-better-than-labour-ministers-using-schools-reorganisation-as-a-political-football.html but essentially the story amounts to Labour Ministers making it clear that they want local education authorities to remove excessive surplus places in schools, to modernise school buildings and to put in place provision to deal with the rise in demand for Welsh medium teaching, and then campaigning against proposals that affect their own area.

In Cardiff’s case a carefully crafted proposal that would have seen a reduction of surplus places in English medium primary schools in the west of the City and provided a solution to an overcrowded Welsh medium Primary School was vetoed by the First Minister despite the fact that it ticked all the boxes in terms of Welsh Government policy.

The Council, which is a coalition between Liberal Democrats and Plaid Cymru were left drawing the only possible conclusion that this was a political decision made by an Administration seeking to make capital at their expense.  As Council Leader, Rodney Berman says:

‘On the face if it, the First Minister’s decision makes little sense until you take into consideration that throughout the process of taking the proposal forward in the last few years, local Labour representatives have fought it tooth and nail in what could be perceived as a wholly hypocritical campaign that has flown in the face of policies their own party has put in place. Indeed the local Labour Assembly Member in this case is none other than Rhodri Morgan himself. Whilst he was still First Minister he attended a protest meeting at the English-medium primary school proposed for closure, telling parents:

“I can see from the amount of people here, you’ve not come for a tickling contest as they say, and there’s strong opposition to the proposals. It’s the job of me, as your AM, to progress that case and I will do that to the best of my ability.”

So now, with his successor as First Minister rejecting the proposals over two years later, I can’t help but wonder if the whole thing has been some sort of set-up in a desperate move designed to piggy-back on a Labour campaign simply in order to benefit the local electoral fortunes of the Labour Party.’

This is not the first time that this has happened, especially with regards to Welsh Medium education. In Swansea local Labour Councillors campaigned hard and long against a new Welsh Medium Primary School being built by a Liberal Democrat-led Administration. As it happens all their fears and those of local residents have proven to be ill-founded. But as a result of their campaign the Minister arbitrarily reduced the size of the school and has so far failed to provide the evidence on which she made her decision, despite Freedom of Information requests.

Ministers cannot have it both ways. They should not be able to intervene to veto important reorganisation plans that have taken years and tens of thousands of pounds to draw up and put in place whilst at the same time advocating views and policies that are diametrically opposed to their actions.

What is even more galling is that even routine decisions hang around in Government offices awaiting a decision for months on end whilst councillors, officers, parents, teachers and governors sit in limbo.

Wales is a small place and has benefited immensely from the openness and transparency that devolution has brought to it. However, its smallness and the ready accessibility of its Assembly politicians means that we are particularly susceptible to public pressure and lobbying. Thus when it comes to the crunch the difficult decisions that need to be made are often finessed or avoided altogether.

This is something that local government has come to terms with and Councillors now are delivering on hard choices. However, Assembly Ministers who have the luxury of not needing to deal with the consequences of their actions are getting off scot-free. That has to change or the whole devolution project will suffer and ultimately fail.

Welsh Liberal Democrat Local Government Spokesperson
peterblack.blogspot.com

Budgets have been set, Council Tax bills have gone out, Council officers are evaluating how they will be delivering services in the current financial year, whilst Councillors and other politicians continue to squabble over some of the very difficult decisions that have needed to be made to make the books balance.

A quick web search reveals a scene of such devastation that one would be forgiven for thinking that the public sector is on the verge of collapse. Nothing could be further from the truth, but what is clear is that the very deep cuts that many Councils have made in the current financial year appear to be just the start of what seems to be local government retrenchment.

As BBC Wales reported, with one in four workers in Wales employed in the public sector the impact of projected budgets cuts could see devastation on a scale not seen since the Thatcher years. Their worse case scenario is that about a third of Council jobs may go. The Welsh Local Government Association (WLGA) has described this as the most difficult financial period in 50 years. They have forecast that 2,000 to 4,000 council jobs could go, with some over the next three to four years.

This will impact regardless of political control. In Labour-led Rhondda Cynon Taf the Council is trying to save £6m by cutting Leisure Centre opening times and public transport. Conservative-led Newport is being forced to make £9m of savings, Independent-Plaid Cymru Anglesey is cutting £10m and there is a reported threat to day care centres, whilst in Conwy their worst case scenario is £6.095m of savings in the 2011/12 financial year, £8.15m of savings in 2012/13 and £10.55m in 2013/14.

Plaid Cymru-led Caerphilly Council has a £25m savings target by 2015, whilst in Liberal Democrat-led Swansea, the Council has invested £10 million in Social Services at the cost of cutting back on schools. They are now in the position of having to manage teacher redundancies so as to minimise the impact on the chalk face. Swansea had to save £17m this year and projects losing hundreds of posts over the next few years.

Many will say that all of this is inevitable in a situation where Britain is in debt and severe budget cuts are going to be the order of the day for years to come. They may be right. Some see it as an opportunity to play games. The Education Minister’s response to Swansea’s budget for example has been to write to the Council to demand an explanation. In return he is being pointed to the lack of investment in education in Wales as compared to England. Here we are being funded at £527 per pupil less than over the border.

The Minister suggests that if Swansea repeats this next year then he will personally intervene. Meanwhile, one of his colleagues, the Deputy Minister for Social Services is rightly insisting that we invest in children’s services. Neither is offering to increase the pot of money available to the Council.

In the case of the Education Minister at least, a startling new agenda for public services is being unveiled – micro management from the centre irrespective of what the local electorate or the accountable local councillors want.

I would argue that some of the problem faced by Councils in reconciling budgets is structural, the rest comes down to a failure to plan for the years of drought during a time of plenty.

Up to 80% of a Council’s income comes directly from central government grant. Of the remaining 20%, a significant proportion is made up of local fees and charges. As a result the impact of a Council Tax increase is very limited whilst local authorities are peculiarly vulnerable to national trends in expenditure. To start making a difference to the budget Councils would need to be raising their tax levels well above the 5% cap the Welsh Government annually imposes on them.

When we look at expenditure too, there are significant issues. At least half of all Council’s expenditure will go on education. The next significant chunk will be for social services, with spending on highways and leisure trailing behind. The scope for savings without hitting front-line services becomes more difficult the more we cut.

There are of course possibilities that money can be saved by restructuring the way that Councils are run, or even by reducing the number of Councils and achieving economies of scale in that way. Councils could collaborate with other public sector bodies in their area to merge back-office systems for example. The problem is that this has been Welsh Government policy for some time and to a large extent it has not been happening, not least because there needs to be an initial investment to get it off the ground and nobody wants to relinquish control.

Councils also need to look at methods of working. Are they getting value for money out of the way they deploy staff? Are there still restrictive practices that can be got rid of? None of this is very attractive but the alternative is redundancies. Many still do not get this reality and are resisting even this sort of change.

Should Councils really be delivering all their services themselves? There is already a long history of local government using private contractors to repair roads, collect refuse, build and repair schools and council buildings. Is there scope to do more? It does not have to amount to privatisation if it is done correctly.

Can Councils really afford for example to deliver residential homes to today’s exacting standards when for example an arms-length trust could do it better? Can they afford to ignore the savings in VAT by letting a similar company run its leisure buildings?  If we do not start to question long-held assumptions about the way that Council services are delivered then we will have none left worth having. All of this takes time and is not without considerable pain. It is though an essential investment in the future of public services.

The biggest crisis facing most Welsh Councils is the cost of modernisation and repair of their existing facilities to bring them up to current health and safety standards. Whether it is schools, old people’s homes, children’s homes, Council offices or roads and street lamps, our infrastructure is rotting around us and there is not enough money to put it right. That sort of investment is becoming urgent and all Councils are having to innovate and cut back on favoured projects to find ways around it.

Of course the bigger structural change has to come in the way that Council’s are financed. The Liberal Democrats have long made the case to replace the unfair Council Tax with one based on people’s ability to pay. If that is a local income tax then at least we can then make some sort of adjustment to ensure more money is collected locally without impacting on people’s pockets. You would for example reduce income tax by a penny and put that penny on local income tax instead. The result would be revenue neutral but redress the funding imbalance.

If Business Rates are to stay then they too should be localised again. This would mean that Councils could keep all the income generated in their area and give them an incentive to improve the take by attracting more businesses or building up the value of existing companies.

None of these revenue-side reforms will actually give more money to local Councils but it will put them more in control of their own destiny and enable them to act more fairly in the way that they tax their local electorate. In the current climate that must be a good thing.

Welsh Liberal Democrat Local Government Spokesperson
peterblack.blogspot.com

Here in Epsom & Ewell, balancing the books this year has been a tricky business.  Car park income is down and since our little borough only gets 11% of council tax charged, that is a pretty important revenue stream.

We abandoned flat-rate Sunday charges a year ago (amidst much complaint) and the ruling Residents' Party, comprising of so-called independent councillors, has decided to charge Blue Badge holders who had, up until now, been accustomed to free parking in our car parks.  Neighbouring boroughs are varied:  Sutton is free we believe, Kingston charges for the most part.

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Few Boroughs can match the political turbulence of Lambeth – the last four elections have seen the administration change hands! This May could make it five, with the added bonus of securing the borough’s first-ever Liberal Democrat MP.

Lambeth packs some 270,000 residents into just a few square miles from the London Eye on the South Bank to Streatham and West Norwood. There are some very wealthy districts of fine Georgian houses or Victorian villas. But northern parts of the borough are still dominated by large estates of modern social housing, too much of it in dismal condition. Further south is more suburban in feel, but with every bit as diverse a population.

Lib Dems here are already whizzing round with a skip in their step. The two by-elections since the last full Council elections in 2006 both showed hefty swings from Labour to Lib Dems, plenty big enough to see Labour ousted from control. 

Labour’s critical weakness in Lambeth is the total collapse of the Council’s housing service, which is now effectively insolvent. It meant rents rocketed by 14 per cent last year despite a ban on non-essential repairs that is leaving estates riddled with broken block doors, windows and fencing. 

But an even more visible sign of the shambolic service are the 1,000 council homes lying empty and tinned up because the council has no money to refurbish them back to a lettable standard. All this after a transfer to an ALMO that scarcely a fifth of tenants voted for – and that is chaired not by a tenant, as was promised, but by the local Labour MP looking to pocket £10,000 in allowances on top of his parliamentary pension! 

Labour’s hold on the Borough has never been as strong as many expect. Split by faction fighting, Labour briefly lost control in the mid-90s and again in 2002. But by 2006 Labour needed scarcely a one per cent swing to recover their majority and set out to make sure they did. We were deluged with direct mail, glossy colour leaflets and what felt like a ministerial visit every other day and could not compete.

We are determined to turn the tables once again. We have worked hard to develop new candidates. We designed our own candidate approval system around a framework of “A Campaigning Liberal Democrat Councillor” testing incumbents and newbies alike to show how they could meet that description. It has helped us refresh the teams in our safer wards even at the cost of some bruised egos.

A highly consultative process has given us a manifesto that will prove an effective campaign tool. It commits us to completing the value-for-money initiative on back-office costs that the Labour administration has abandoned. We will resource effective crime prevention rather than the pointless, populist name-and-shame Labour approach. 

We are pledged to solve the primary school place shortage that Labour ignored for too long, not sit helplessly waiting for government money we all know will never come. And we will get estates and mansion blocks recycling, aiming to double the rate where Labour have let it stagnate at its 2006 level. And while Labour leave overcrowded families staring at boarded up empty homes, we will make zero tolerance of empty Council homes an absolutely central principle.         

All of this is backed up by a seamlessly integrated campaign with our three PPCs. Streatham, in the South of the Borough is fighting to win in 2010 and has well constructed messages to unite both General and Council election campaigns.

So drop us a line via www.lambethlibdems.org.uk if you can help one of our best chances to score Lib Dem wins both in 2010 elections.