11 October (Part 1) - Read about the money
There
was a Finance and Corporate Services Committee meeting last Tuesday chaired by
councillor Philip Read. He started off well enough with a welcome to the members
of the public - all three of us - and ran through the usual recording
not permitted tripe as dictated by the all powerful Teresa.
Once again councillor Jackie Evans was missing and we all know why.
We were told that all of the Performance Indicators were showing green (Key Indicators
Pages 8 to 16), although the documentation showed the occasional amber tinge. In reply
to a question about bad debts we learned that 66% of council tax is paid by Direct Debit
and councillor Malik asked the Finance Director if there were any worrying trends
developing. It was presumably Mike Ellsmore who replied - I couldn’t quite see
after moving from an embarrassingly squeaky seat - who said that he “sometimes
hold my breath at the speed at which we chase up late payments” and he was
asking his staff “to look for more innovative solutions”. Thumb screws perhaps?
Mr. Ellsmore repeated what we have heard a dozen times before, that providing
Children’s Services is putting a lot of pressure on the budget.
The responsible cabinet member made his report. Campbell said that Welfare Reform
had provided “a very difficult first three months”. That's the 5% minimum council
tax the poor have had to pay since April and the cap on housing benefits, bedroom tax etc.
Fortunately, said Campbell, the Department of Work and Pensions had got their
forecast for Bexley badly wrong. Instead of the expected 300 plus families affected
there were only 162. “Vulnerable adults” he said “were dealt with very
sympathetically but that may not be sustainable long term”. Despite that he
admitted that “a very large number” had been taken to court.
Campbell again mentioned the looming £40 million black hole, ten million
next year and 30 more by 2018. His plan to side-step
it involved protecting front line services and possibly “stopping doing
some things”. Children’s Services being a drain on resources got another
mention and in what may be a rare moment of honesty Campbell said “some of the things
going on in Children’s Services make you wonder what the heck is going on”. A
rich endorsement of Bexley’s many failings in that area if ever there was one.
Moving
on to Agenda Item 8, councillor Craske suggested that the cost of answering individual
Freedom of Information requests should be published. The complaints officer,
probably Suzanne Lloyd but she was too far away to positively identify, said that she was
looking into that possibility for the future. Makes you wonder how they were published
in the past. Plucked out of thin air presumably.
Councillor Malik queried the big drop in the number of complaints recorded
compared to last year but the answer was pretty straight forward, complaints
about missed bin collections are no longer logged as complaints, neither are
parking appeals. Nothing has actually changed but it looks better that way.
For Agenda Item 9, chairman Read went off on some flight or irrelevant fancy
about the International Monetary Fund and the UK economy. He said it
illustrated how well Bexley has coped with the economic crisis. Councillor Munir
Malik asked if that has allowed the regeneration of the borough but I don’t think
he got an answer.
Later Munir was critical of the council’s website. Councillor Gillespie related
how he spent ages looking for a council tax registration form on the web, but
eventually gave up. He was advised that was an inspired decision - the form is
not there. Council Officer Graham Ward blamed the sub-contractor, for now you
have to ask Capita for a form. For some inexplicable reason the Agenda referred
to the longer time that people were spending on the website (up 13%) as a good
thing. Councillor Gillespie may not agree.
Councillor
Maxine Fothergill was asked to report on the findings of her Finance
Sub-Committee. Chairman Read said some of her recommendations
were already in use. I don’t think he meant they had been instantly implemented, I got
the impression she had wasted her time, but I could be wrong.
Councillor Malik was concerned about how some chairmen saw their roles and
criticised the quality of debate. He believed some chairmen saw their committee
as a “personal fiefdom”. This suggestion did not find favour and the volume rose
several decibels. Read put himself firmly in the ‘personal fiefdom’ camp by wagging his
finger vigorously at councillor Malik and threatening to exclude him from the
chamber under some obscure standing order or other. The row subsided almost as quickly
as it arose.
Dave Easton, Head of Electoral Services, then delivered what was probably the most generally interesting
report of the evening. The Electoral Roll registration system, he said, was moving to an individual
based arrangement from the long established address based system. It should reduce
electoral fraud and the switchover will be a big operation with plenty of publicity and Road Shows.
Councillor Craske thought Mr. Easton’s report to be good and “very comprehensive”. For the
first time in my life I am going to agree with Peter Craske.
Finally came the brief discussion of Business Rates. Councillor Craske summed
things up by saying that “we have replaced a system that was complicated
with one that is even more complicated”. Now that’s embarrassing; two
endorsements of Craske’s opinion within the space of two paragraphs.
The meeting lasted 63 minutes.