Liberal Democrat Alternative Budget (Oxfordshire Liberal Democrats)

Liberal Democrat Alternative Budget

February 10, 2009 10:10 AM
By Cllr Zoe Patrick in County Council

I am delighted to present our Opposition budget at Council today. I would like to thank Sue Scane and her team, and in particular her colleague, Katherine, who spent many hours with us preparing this budget and thus ensuring we have a robust proposal to put before you. I would also like to express my gratitude to both Stephanie and Cllr Alan Armitage for the hard work they have put into this on our behalf.

The government settlement is always a challenge to us, especially the way the grant formula is worked out which means that many grants which benefit councils in the north actually hamper those of us in the South East. I must repeat that Liberal Democrats still stand by the fact that this is an unfair system, which does not work; it penalises those who are elderly or on low incomes, but until there is total reform, we will continue to battle on with what we have got.

As usual, we have before us four budget proposals for discussion, one that will be agreed, and the other three which will not. And we will spend 5 good hours of the day debating what we would all wish for, but knowing that we will have to settle for less. But I am offering this Council today a real alternative budget, a budget which will really make a difference to the people of Oxfordshire and takes into account forward planning for our services in the future.

Our Council tax increase is the same as the Conservatives' but the difference is that we are spending more on services and less on backroom functions in the corporate core. I shall therefore present to you our Opposition budget, our alternative budget which will have a very small council tax rise but will deliver much more value for money.

Our budget concentrates on three key areas: children and young people, older people and the environment, including maintaining our roads, pavements and cycleways.

• Children & Young People

Our budget increases the Children's budget by £800K which is £300K more than the Cabinet are planning to spend. Our key spending areas are:

• £250K more to retain the Early Years funding for work with children at risk

• £100K for more outreach youth work

• We have proposals for apprenticeships and have removed the savings proposals for educational and social work apprenticeships

• We have provided additional one-off admin support for children's social workers to help them adapt to new ways of working

• We have provided a one-off grant to Home Start

• We have removed the savings from the Community Safety youth diversion schemes

• We have added a Health and Safety Officer for schools

• In the Capital programme we redirect the Cabinet's investment in youth centres (including a start on a new centre for Wantage/Grove and a fund for centres not owned directly by the County Council but where improvements are needed).

Social & Community Services

Our budget increases the Social and Community Services budget by £160K - this is £600K more than the Cabinet proposals. Main spending points are:

• £250K more for support for older carers

• £235K more for occupational therapy

• £133K more to reduce savings to be identified in the older people's budget

• £50K one-off to support vulnerable adults through the money management service, enabling the transition to a new database and eliminating the backlog of cases.

Environment & Economy

• We reintroduce a general weed control budget of £95K, offset by our additional energy savings. From 2010/11 onwards we will be spending £530K additional money on general highway repairs - on roads, pavements and cyclepaths.

• For two years, there is also an additional £114K for "community safety schemes" - these are pedestrian crossings that were removed from the Local Transport Plan

• £250,000 will be spent on energy efficiency measures. We are setting challenging targets for all departments to reduce their energy costs by requiring double the savings targets set by the administration's proposals, and this investment will assist them to do this

• Extra funding for speeding up the backlog of footpath diversions .

My shadow cabinet members will go into more detail on all these proposals.

We will help fund some of these services from extra saving measures that we want to introduce in their own right:

• We would not appoint the Head of Communications - our view is that this post is totally unnecessary. His or her workload would be re-designated. This post is not only empire-building in the corporate core but has already been advertised and interviewed for last week. Indeed the advertisement refers to "the council spends £5.5m on advertising, marketing and promotional material, all of which needs to support the corporate style of branding overseen by the post-holders service". The advert even refers to increased new staffing structure. This is presumptuous in the extreme when the budget for it has not been agreed by full council. Not only that, but with just 3 applicants (one in Australia) - it doesn't look like there is much enthusiasm from outside for such a post.

• We would increase the charges for skips, hoardings and scaffolding placed on the highway by 10% in order to encourage builders to remove obstacles to traffic quickly

• We would reintroduce charges for evening and Sunday parking in Oxford, and increase charges by 10% as they have not been increased since 2007. The aim is to reduce traffic and encourage the use of off-street parking (both Park and Ride and City centre)

• We propose a reduction in the number and unnecessarily glossy style of council publications.

• Like last year, we do not fund all the Local Area Agreement (LAA) 2 increases, feeling that the staff increases proposed was excessive. We remain unconvinced of the need for so many staff and so we are proposing to reduce the staffing level and redeploy them to other vacant posts. Now, at a time of recession, we feel that there need to be cuts in this largely backroom function. We believe our proposals will have no effect on the ability of Directorates to achieve the LAA2 targets and thus gain the reward grants.

• We also would wish to reprioritise some of the schemes in the Transport Capital Programme to meet our priorities, when this is discussed in March.

As I point out in my report, LABGI money will be allocated to economic development proposals such as a grant to the Business Link to help them provide advice for businesses in difficulties, a fund to assist communities engage in development projects, a two year project to fund basic English lessons for speakers of other languages to assist them get onto the job ladder and additional funding for the Oxfordshire Economic Partnership to assist the work of their economic recession task force. The balance of the money will also be spent on economic development and measures to help Oxfordshire residents and businesses survive the recession.

Our message is clear -

We are putting people first by providing Oxfordshire residents with a real alternative to this Conservative administration.

• More spending on care for the frail, elderly and other vulnerable adults.

• More spending on children, including more investment in youth services

• More spending on road, pavement and cycling maintenance including weed control

This is a real opportunity to use our budget to provide real services that people rely on. Let us put an end to the wastage on glossy publications and appointments which are not necessary. Surely a front-line social worker is much more important than a director of communications and marketing?

The council tax rise is exactly the same for the first two years, and only slightly increases after that to give us a bit more headroom to combat future pressures.

Please support this budget today and give Oxfordshire residents much better value for money and more choice in how their money is being spent.

Oxfordshire Liberal Democrats