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Monumental budget folly
• IT would be churlish for Labour not to recognise that the Lib Dem/Tory alliance at the Town Hall in this year’s budget had moved a long way from the insanity of last year’s budget of a “zero council tax rate rise”.
That piece of Tory gesture politics was a straitjacket designed for misery around the borough, and the Liberal Democrats cravenly went along with it.
Because in the context of rising inflation, national salary scale increases for council employees, and in a borough where there are so many social challenges, that piece of economic illiteracy inevitably meant huge cuts to balance the books.
Although no doubt it is useful for the Lib Dem/Tory “spin machine” to preen itself when we now acknowledge some of the positive work done by councillors of all parties, including those on my resources scrutiny committee which looks at the Camden budget all year round, your report of the annual “snapshot” budget debate at the Town Hall sadly took little account of some of the sharp political divides which remain.
The Labour budget amendment, which your story did not cover at all, proposed many policies for “tackling exclusion” in Camden, for example, by restoring the award-winning welfare rights unit; a reversal of the appalling “outsourcing” of Careline which is so important for the elderly and disabled; a reversal of the disgraceful increases last year for meals on wheels; a reversal of the cuts in last year’s budget imposed on what used to be London’s best play and youth service; and a practical way of reopening the Jubilee Waterside Centre, which your columns have rightly indicated as a tragic waste of superb new facilities in a much challenged part of the borough.
It is also important to note the capital budget. After years of Labour campaigning we are about to receive the largest injection of capital funding ever in Camden, the Building Schools for the Future programme. This was announced in October 2006, and it is a precious inheritance from a Labour administration that we will be monitoring closely, because this gives the “once in a lifetime” opportunity to refurbish our outstanding secondary schools, and in particular the chance to build one or two new schools. If we can negotiate the purchase of the Eastman site on the Gray’s Inn Road then we can achieve the longstanding Inner London Education Authority and Camden policy to build a secondary school south of the Euston Road, where the major school places deficit has existed for generations.
Above all, there is a political chasm between the political parties on the “sale of the family silver” of our precious council homes. This total abdication of the public trust, and a denial of the rights of so many who have no other chance of a home, is a monumental political blunder. Indeed, from your recent story, it appears that the ruthlessness of this sales policy takes scant account of tenants who want to return home after repairs have been done on their flats: “Sorry, it has just been sold by auction.”
We will certainly be watching carefully for other impending disasters, such as the demolition of half of the Maiden Lane estate to sell it off to private speculators cashing in on the King’s Cross development, or the nonsense of “outsourcing” the caretaking service to private security firms.
We might have expected these outrages from the Tories in their worst Thatcherite mode, but for the Liberal Democrats to be pursuing them in “joint harness” with the Tories is monumental folly.
CLLR JULIAN FULBROOK
Labour, Holborn and
Covent Garden Ward
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