Monday 14 January 2008

Labour Cabinet proposes stringent cuts in services but has plenty to spend on Town Hall that is due for demolition

Spending £125,000 on the soon to be demolished Redcar & Cleveland Town Hall and Finegan Hall, whilst making stringent cuts in public services is like putting new tyres on a car just to tow it to the scrapyard.

The Council's Labour cabinet have done just that at a time when they are faced with slashing millions of pounds from the Council's budget.

What do the Labour Cabinet think they are playing at? According to the latest Cabinet Business papers, to be considered at the Cabinet meeting on 22nd January, they plan to include the following popular public services as part of a series of cuts totaling £5.5m:
  • Slash £112.700 from the Library service
  • increase the charge for junk jobs from £10 to £15
  • remove all bring sites
  • end the 'bring out your dross' scheme
  • slash maintenance on play equipment
  • introduce charges for green box replacement
  • cease winter flower bedding
  • reduce funding for supporting people and housing efficiency
  • cut grants to voluntary organisations

The former Coalition spent four years building up and improving public services, which earned us four star excellent status, but within one year the Labour Council are poised to wreck much of this good work with stringent cuts in public services that will surely send the Council back to the bad old pre-Coalition days when we were a failing Council.

UPDATE 15/1/08: We have received an anonymous comment referring to the allegations of a £12million black hole in the council's funding that the Labour leader claimed was left by the Lib Dem led Coalition in office until May last year. This claim was retracted a couple of days later and a full account can be read here.

We have not published the comment because it contains what we consider may be libelous remarks. As pointed out many times before, we are not prepared to publish anonymous comments which we consider are offensive about anyone, including ourselves. Nor do we publish comments from fake names either. On more than one occasion we have received comments from people using the same fake names that we see regularly in the Evening Gazette letters page.

No comments: