Hundreds more council staff are facing the sack

Published: 23 July, 2010

• THIS week Labour councillors took the unusual step of putting down a motion at the council meeting calling for the resignations of both council leader Colin Barrow and the cabinet member for finance Melvyn Caplan.

We called for their resignation because of the £20million hole in the council’s finances which is the reason for the £60million of cuts over the next three years agreed by the council at the end of June.

The £20million hole is entirely the fault of the Conservatives who have run the council on an unsustainable financial strategy based on the belief that parking fines and parking charges would keep rising.

This financial crisis is entirely “Made in Westminster”.

This has got nothing to do with national politics.

The savage cuts announced in George Osborne’s Budget will require a further £10million to be cut from the council’s budget in October on top of the £5.7million of local government cuts announced by Eric Pickles in early June.

So what has gone so badly wrong in Westminster that the leader and the finance cabinet member must go?
Three years ago the council’s income for parking fines and parking charges started to fall dramatically and that is when the real financial problems started.

Last year £14million of cuts were made and 300 staff were sacked.

But the problem did not go away because the council’s entire financial strategy is fatally flawed and has been for years.

Everything has been based on ever-increasing parking revenues and no increases in the council tax.

The Conservatives’ dogma has been so blinkered that even when successive directors of finance had recommended small, but regular, increases in the council tax they ignored the advice of their professional advisers.

Indeed if the Conservatives had taken the sensible and prudent decisions to increase the council tax by small increments of around 2 per cent when advised to do so, the council would have been £13million better off this year and every subsequent year.

This would have cost the average band D council taxpayer about £40 a year.

Now, instead of this sensible and prudent financial strategy, hundreds more council staff will be sacked, front-line services will be slashed and charges will go up.

The Conservatives will no doubt say that tax increases hit the poor harder than others.

But that has not stopped them increasing VAT by 2.5 per cent or proposing a new student tax.

We cannot turn the clock back and we must move forward.

So what is to be done?

First, Conservatives need to make an unreserved apology to Westminster residents, the staff they have sacked and the victims of the service cuts.

Second, those people responsible for the financial mess are not the right people to lead us out of it.

Councillors Barrow and Caplan should go.

Now.

CLLR PAUL DIMOLDENBERG
Leader of the Labour Group,
Westminster City Council