Like every other local council in the UK, my local council in Denbighshire has had to contend with significant cuts to it's budget. Since the heady days of New Labour when "Things can only get better" in an economy being run on the principle of "prudence", the UK public sector has been allowed to swell like one of those marrows being lined up to take first prize in the local agricultural show. The problem is that just like the marrow, an overly large council has to be nursed with kid gloves to ensure it's continued growth. But as with all biological systems, the marrow has a finite size to which it can feasibly grow before nature calls time with a series of intricate molecular triggers. My local council is just like that marrow. It has now grown to an unsustainable size following years of assisted life support.
Figures appear to suggest that my local council has to account for a funding cut of around £8.5 million for 2015/16. If you were running my local council as an accountable public service, how would you make those cuts. Before you try and answer that, it is perhaps instructive to consider that the current Chief Executive realised a salary award of £160,141 last year. A further 18 posts each received salaries in excess of £50,000. So that is a shade over a million pounds per annum and, to coin the lovely parlance of the film series "Despicable Me", that doesn't even include the minions (of whom many). For the record, our Prime Minister last year received a salary of £142,000.00 - and he has to decide whether to take action in Iraq and Syria!
In an interview over the weekend, the current leader of the council claimed that statutory services should not be immune from cuts. This explains the decision of my local council to put out to consultation the concept of continuing with our care homes for the elderly. By the way, it is my experience that consultation in the modern world is a euphemism for "fait accompli". As a sad testament to an organisation which has become infected with an insatiable lust for power, this latest move has a set a new low in standards. It has also further increased the already gaping chasm between the local government behemoth and it's council tax paying public.
If it were being run in an overtly transparent manner, there would be no need for suspicion to arise. But it isn't. In the previous four tax years, my local council has spent an outrageous £443,188.28 in gagging orders whereby erstwhile members of staff are disposed of with a sum of money to ensure they don't disclose what really goes on behind closed doors - and this is a public service organisation which is supposed to be accountable to the public. That figure was only even divulged following a freedom of information request!
Last year, the community hospital in Llangollen was closed after 137 years' sterling service to a grateful local community. If that was the whole story, that would be sad enough but barely three months after that closure, plans were announced to build a new one a few hundred metres down the road. For a council which always assures us of how hard times are, they have some very grandiose habits.
In a similar vein, they closed down the very company which they had put in place to run three prominent leisure facilities in Rhyl and Prestatyn on the North Wales coast. They have since changed their minds several times with the latest version being that they intend to go ahead with an £18 million project to revitalise the sea front in Rhyl. Their legendary predecessor famously spent a similarly huge amount of money in 1996 when building the Children's Village. If there is a bigger white elephant anywhere in the UK, I would be truly shocked. The latest plans will succeed in achieving the same effect on an even bigger scale. The Children's Village famously did what children everywhere didn't want - it removed the sea and the beach from view. What child anywhere would buy in to that?
Back in Denbigh, the long running saga of the former North Wales Hospital has now reached the stage of my local council seeking a compulsory purchase order from the Welsh Assembly Government. The chances of that request being refused are akin to me waking up on the moon tomorrow morning. When they eventually "acquire" this site, they will begin their real project. They will seek to fleece as much money as they can out of this once beautiful site by building as many houses as they possibly can. This will provide them with a much needed cash injection to sponsor their plans elsewhere.
Having been defeated by people power in their quest to close our local faith school at St. Brigid's, they have signalled their intent to close it anyway by 2018 and I have no doubt that they won't rest until they have succeeded. A few miles across the Vale in Llanbedr, they did the same with a Church of Wales primary school. Perhaps they feel uncomfortable with children growing up with a set of values which faith can provide? Whatever the answer, the motives for their decisions remain obvious only to themselves.
When Wales voted in favour of devolution on September 18th 1997, the vote was carried by a wafer then margin. Since then, we have witnessed more power for the Welsh Assembly in Cardiff and a growing gulf between the haves in the South and the have-nots in the North. On a local level, our local councils have become ever more powerful while the people they are supposed to serve have become less relevant than ever. As the Stranglers famously sang in 1977, "Something better change".
It is often supposed that in times of economic hardship, people and organisations have to become more imaginative with the limited resources at their disposal. As I survey the town where I live, I see evidence aplenty that local people and local businesses are doing just that. All the while, their local council seems hell bent on just carrying on regardless. During recent months, I have witnessed a flurry of community-led activities which have all served to regenerate enthusiasm for a town which has been so badly let down by a council which is just too out of touch to know how to care.
The leader of my local council has called for the Welsh Assembly Government to stop interfering with their spending plans. And no surprise either. No government, devolved or not, should ever knowingly stand by and witness this appalling behaviour. In the end though, it will not be the Welsh Assembly government who decides how our local should behave. I am convinced the local people will do that job.
In the latest pathetic attempt to generate some extra income to fund their half-baked ideas, the council has just announced that it plans to start charging residents (all of whom already pay one of the highest council tax bills in Wales) for the collection of their green waste. This is crass stupidity and will only widen the existing gulf between them and the public. The trouble is that the council members who are making these decisions are seldom the local councillors who have been voted in. You can get rid of the latter at elections but the executive directors appear to be made of teflon. Like the strange regime in North Korea, they are impervious to criticism living in a comfort bubble while all around them face daily struggles of a truly Maslowian magnitude.
In his interview, the council leader even went so far as to suggest that some council employees might lose their jobs. But we can all rest assured it won't be the ones at the top. In a joke book I was given when I was a lot longer, I read that a bureaucracy is like cess-pit where the really big bits float to the top. All these years later, I now finally understand what it was trying to say. The marrow in this particular garden is about to have the intensive care taken away and is squirming like a fish on a line.
Figures appear to suggest that my local council has to account for a funding cut of around £8.5 million for 2015/16. If you were running my local council as an accountable public service, how would you make those cuts. Before you try and answer that, it is perhaps instructive to consider that the current Chief Executive realised a salary award of £160,141 last year. A further 18 posts each received salaries in excess of £50,000. So that is a shade over a million pounds per annum and, to coin the lovely parlance of the film series "Despicable Me", that doesn't even include the minions (of whom many). For the record, our Prime Minister last year received a salary of £142,000.00 - and he has to decide whether to take action in Iraq and Syria!
In an interview over the weekend, the current leader of the council claimed that statutory services should not be immune from cuts. This explains the decision of my local council to put out to consultation the concept of continuing with our care homes for the elderly. By the way, it is my experience that consultation in the modern world is a euphemism for "fait accompli". As a sad testament to an organisation which has become infected with an insatiable lust for power, this latest move has a set a new low in standards. It has also further increased the already gaping chasm between the local government behemoth and it's council tax paying public.
If it were being run in an overtly transparent manner, there would be no need for suspicion to arise. But it isn't. In the previous four tax years, my local council has spent an outrageous £443,188.28 in gagging orders whereby erstwhile members of staff are disposed of with a sum of money to ensure they don't disclose what really goes on behind closed doors - and this is a public service organisation which is supposed to be accountable to the public. That figure was only even divulged following a freedom of information request!
Last year, the community hospital in Llangollen was closed after 137 years' sterling service to a grateful local community. If that was the whole story, that would be sad enough but barely three months after that closure, plans were announced to build a new one a few hundred metres down the road. For a council which always assures us of how hard times are, they have some very grandiose habits.
In a similar vein, they closed down the very company which they had put in place to run three prominent leisure facilities in Rhyl and Prestatyn on the North Wales coast. They have since changed their minds several times with the latest version being that they intend to go ahead with an £18 million project to revitalise the sea front in Rhyl. Their legendary predecessor famously spent a similarly huge amount of money in 1996 when building the Children's Village. If there is a bigger white elephant anywhere in the UK, I would be truly shocked. The latest plans will succeed in achieving the same effect on an even bigger scale. The Children's Village famously did what children everywhere didn't want - it removed the sea and the beach from view. What child anywhere would buy in to that?
Back in Denbigh, the long running saga of the former North Wales Hospital has now reached the stage of my local council seeking a compulsory purchase order from the Welsh Assembly Government. The chances of that request being refused are akin to me waking up on the moon tomorrow morning. When they eventually "acquire" this site, they will begin their real project. They will seek to fleece as much money as they can out of this once beautiful site by building as many houses as they possibly can. This will provide them with a much needed cash injection to sponsor their plans elsewhere.
Having been defeated by people power in their quest to close our local faith school at St. Brigid's, they have signalled their intent to close it anyway by 2018 and I have no doubt that they won't rest until they have succeeded. A few miles across the Vale in Llanbedr, they did the same with a Church of Wales primary school. Perhaps they feel uncomfortable with children growing up with a set of values which faith can provide? Whatever the answer, the motives for their decisions remain obvious only to themselves.
When Wales voted in favour of devolution on September 18th 1997, the vote was carried by a wafer then margin. Since then, we have witnessed more power for the Welsh Assembly in Cardiff and a growing gulf between the haves in the South and the have-nots in the North. On a local level, our local councils have become ever more powerful while the people they are supposed to serve have become less relevant than ever. As the Stranglers famously sang in 1977, "Something better change".
It is often supposed that in times of economic hardship, people and organisations have to become more imaginative with the limited resources at their disposal. As I survey the town where I live, I see evidence aplenty that local people and local businesses are doing just that. All the while, their local council seems hell bent on just carrying on regardless. During recent months, I have witnessed a flurry of community-led activities which have all served to regenerate enthusiasm for a town which has been so badly let down by a council which is just too out of touch to know how to care.
The leader of my local council has called for the Welsh Assembly Government to stop interfering with their spending plans. And no surprise either. No government, devolved or not, should ever knowingly stand by and witness this appalling behaviour. In the end though, it will not be the Welsh Assembly government who decides how our local should behave. I am convinced the local people will do that job.
In the latest pathetic attempt to generate some extra income to fund their half-baked ideas, the council has just announced that it plans to start charging residents (all of whom already pay one of the highest council tax bills in Wales) for the collection of their green waste. This is crass stupidity and will only widen the existing gulf between them and the public. The trouble is that the council members who are making these decisions are seldom the local councillors who have been voted in. You can get rid of the latter at elections but the executive directors appear to be made of teflon. Like the strange regime in North Korea, they are impervious to criticism living in a comfort bubble while all around them face daily struggles of a truly Maslowian magnitude.
In his interview, the council leader even went so far as to suggest that some council employees might lose their jobs. But we can all rest assured it won't be the ones at the top. In a joke book I was given when I was a lot longer, I read that a bureaucracy is like cess-pit where the really big bits float to the top. All these years later, I now finally understand what it was trying to say. The marrow in this particular garden is about to have the intensive care taken away and is squirming like a fish on a line.
And remember, very soon Denbighshire & Conwy County Councils could be joining hands - now that really is a scary thought!
ReplyDeleteIt is scary but only because the redundancies will be dished out to the wrong end of the pyramid. Having said that, if this means the gradual demise of local government in favour of greater community-led activity, bring it on!
ReplyDeleteYou do realise it wasn't the Council who closed Llangollen Hospital and who are developing the new health centre don't you?
ReplyDeleteAlso the Welsh Assembly was indeed only voted for by the narrowest of margins in 199. If you're suggesting that it therefore lacks some sort of legitimacy then you also need to be aware of a second referendum in 2011 which provided a result of over 60% wanting law making powers for the Assembly. All authority areas produced Yes victories with exception of Monmouthshire.