Tories borrowing more and dipping into emergency reserves show they have taken their eye off the ball?

 

Northumberland County Council is led and has been led by a crumbling set of ancient thinkers for the last seven years without the vision or the ability to remember what they asked for during the previous nine years when two different parties achieved Best Value on a regular and ongoing basis.

 The Tories who reminded people that grass verges weren’t being cut in rural areas a number of years ago are showing they also have been ignoring rural grounds maintenance as much as they can in order to spend and waste the Councils cash on glory projects such as the beautification of County Hall which has cost at least 400 families their jobs to cover off the cost.

What we have seen over the last few years are a number of issues which suggest that this Conservative Administration has taken its eye completely off the ball.

We have had the fiasco and  primary myopic problem of permanent piecemeal pothole management with costs of repairing cars damaged by the Council being forked out at an embarrassing rate. Its primarily due to cutting back funds from services slipping the funds over to glamour projects with soaring costs and the Conservatives answer: Lets charge our residents one of the highest council taxes in England and still not tackle potholes or the delivery of other services correctly.

We have had the fiasco over the non-cutting of the roadside verges in the north and the west of the county hoping Parish and Town Councils will pick up the costs. Surely this points to the need for devolution of local budgets and accountability to each part of Northumberland. We will have better local services with local control or do the unthinkable as far as the Tories are concerned and have a mixed cabinet with all parties involved in decision making.

We have had the fiasco of transferring key services from Active Northumberland and privatising Leisure Services to Places for People, a private sector run organisation with little or no local accountability as the Tories don’t care.  What’s happened – panic management, the derecognition of the Trade Unions - a serious failure of governance, no business plan open to the public, and unrequited cost implications running forward.

We have had the long term pantomime of a failing planning service which has lost £millions in cases where developers have won permissions on appeal and the compensatory costs are not just high financially but have led in many cases to local people feeling disenfranchised by their democratically elected representatives.

More than this, Labour Councillors have been given some revealing information about Northumberland Conservatives use of public money. They have stripped out reserves and are now using emergency funds, plus the ‘Secret Cabinet’ are borrowing more during this period of massively high interest rates taking debt well over £1.25Bn.

Opposition Councillors have been informed that the bill for outside consultants has rocketed over the last 7 years and the cost of compensating top officers as The Council Leader’s wing-walk through employment law. Despite both the current and previous Conservative Leaders' empty promises some time ago, the cost of consultants has doubled up to a staggering £2.4m million per year.

On top of this the annual bill for the Council’s using its internal communications department as spin doctors to deliver politics instead of public news stories amounts to some £0.5 million per year.

In rounding up not summing up as the Council has a myriad of failures that require public scrutiny, the fiasco of leading residents up the garden path and down the crooked mile in the name of Levelling Up is abhorrent with broken promises littering the Northumberland Conservatives ‘road to nowhere’ with broken promises to their constituents: let's take the promised 8000 new jobs for South East Northumberland as a prime example, where are they now? 

Disappeared just like the promises to deliver Best Value each and every year for the last seven years of failure in the spend of public cash. Now that their own Government has placed Northumberland County Council 300th of the 301 Councils the Nations Best Value indicators cover it shows the County will never recover under any ‘Secret Conservative Administration’ now or at any time in the future.