Real Northumberland Murky: Having to launch two new departments will force Northumberland Council Tax up to its maximum?

Now it's out into the open that Northumberland Conservatives who held reserves of cash second to none left by Labour in 2017 decided to embark on an identical route to their former well documented Castle Morpeth Borough Council and follow Oscar Wylde’s ‘it's not true gov’ road to ruin when Lord Queensbury outed him in public.

Its reported that the spend, spend, spend attitude of Northumberland Conservatives and their denial of their excesses has led to debt levels of 300% of their annual revenue core spend churnover and 17.4% of the cash you as a taxpayer expects to have services delivered with, being creamed off to keep up the HP payments on their debt.

News was broken by the Blog, North-East bylines, who graphed up the figures for the first time that the government released debt and borrowing figures this year.

The debt repayment statistics are among the first to be published by Oflog, THE OFFICE FOR LOCAL GOVERNMENT which was launched on 4 July under interim chair Lord Morse, a former chair of the National Audit Office, as announced in January by Levelling Up Secretary Michael Gove and include empowering citizens with information about their local authority, enabling them to hold local leaders to account. Its first publications, apart from local authority finance, cover adult social care, waste management and adult skills.

It is normal for local authorities to borrow to invest. What is not normal, as the Oflog figures show, is the level of indebtedness reached by a few councils, including Northumberland County Council. Councillors and officials may take comfort in the fact that their debts are within the Prudential Code, but council taxpayers could still be forgiven if they are uneasy or even concerned, as their Council has not come clean about its debt levels even though a section 114 notice was delivered two years ago by their financial manager because of the rising debt and unlawful payments along with exposure of its inability to deliver BEST VALUE for its taxpayers.

Council Taxpayers with mortgages will know first hand what difficulties interest rate volatility can bring. It is now evident that some council officials are becoming very concerned too.

Even after being warned Northumberland County Council, a Tory led Unitary Authority, has long been warned of budget challenges through their personal need to service chummy projects and still manage service delivery in some expensive to run areas such as social services. Unlike many local authorities NCC should not have had to make any tough choices, as they were left in the best financial position of any Council in the North of England in 2017 when Labour was voted out of office, and we Codgers who look after this blog are worried about the recent audit report and the the tone of its latest financial reports that will stop projects being delivered in their tracks as they reflect a greater sense of alarm than ever. Its huge debt is part of the reason.

Things have got so bad at County Hall the debt laden half finished project to modernise this monstrosity of a building has drained much of those reserves along with pouring millions of pounds above the very generous ‘building schools for the future’ cash from Government into academies that the Council has no input into and expanding the offer in Castle Morpeth Areas to include massive add on schemes in places like Ponteland.

Local social media has begun to ramp up the pressure on Glen Sandersons bucolic Council by suggesting that two new departments of the Council will be announced on budget day early next year, the ‘Computer say NO Department’ to deal with enquiries from the public and the ‘Lang Stand’ department for anyone who turns up at County Hall to express their disdain or lodge a complaint.