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News and Comment March 2024

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10 March (Part 3) - When is a tweak not a tweak?

Next up to not properly consider the Labour Group’s Budget Amendment was Cabinet Member for Adults’ Services Melvin Seymour who said he was a working class boy who didn’t understand why the party opposite thought it had a monopoly on compassion. “Opposition is being able to run with the fox and hunt with the hounds and not actually having to deliver anything.” He hinted that his opinion of the current government is very similar to mine and added that the Leader of the Labour Party has no time for Local Government either.

“Some parts of our housing stock are not what they should be”. Housing should be affordable, a place in which people feel safe, within a neighbourhood where amenities can be enjoyed, with sufficient recreational space and school places and enough GPs. “Strange then that all three Labour Members on the Planning Committee voted in support of the [inaudible] development in Crayford which has none of those things.”

“In 2022/23 we supported an average of 430 people in residential care settings. In 2023/24 it was 681 not including respite care beds. Home care in 2022/23 1,037 people and in 2023/24 1,666. Discharged for Assessment in 2023/24 73 people a month and much higher In 2023/24 largely due to Covid pressures and NHS strikes.”

“Supporting Learning Disability cases are up from 158 to 208 and that is why I will oppose the Budget Amendment and support this one.” All impressive but worrying figures with no relevance to the Amendment unless the unspent CIL money is going to be handed over to Adult Care.

Could Councillor Cameron Smith do any better? He immediately said he would oppose the Amendment “because it doesn’t address any of the challenges we face and it is looking for an easy way out”. He wanted “removal of the cap on Council Tax increases” and also “to invest in our local services at the most affordable price we can for residents”. (I think he lost me there. More Council Tax but more affordable?)

On firmer ground he said that Bexley does not stoop to the levels of other Councils. In Hounslow an LTN affecting two streets raised £26 million. The Mayor of London raised Council Tax by 71% and TfL fined Bexley residents more than a million pounds in the first three months of ULEZ alone. “This Council does not go to the extraordinary lengths that Labour Councils are going to to bail out their mismanagement.”

He went on. Neither do we, as in Greenwich, propose that schools pay £8,000 a year for their school crossing patrols. They are also cutting a million from the tax breaks previously offered to the poorest residents and some motorists are charged up to £7·70 an hour to park. (As they are for on-street parking in Abbey Wood.) “We do not go to those lengths and we have a balanced budget.” Instead we have “19 more road resurfacing projects, £1·6 million to be spent filling pot holes, £1·7 million on electric vehicle charging, fly tipping fines up from £400 to £1,000 and four new Zebra crossings”.

“That is the budget I will vote for and I cannot vote for an empty Amendment with no value. Oppositions are supposed to offer an alternative and they have not.” (First they say the Amendment is ‘a Budget Tweak’ then it becomes something radically different excluding all the good things Cameron mentioned only a moment earlier. Tribal politics is a very strange game and we all suffer by it.)

Councillor Caroline Newton was next but I suspect everyone needs a short rest from this pantomime - or is it a Whitehall Farce, for those old enough to have laughed at Brian Rix on a 12 inch TV screen?

 

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