County Lib Dems call for cuts to be phased over four years not 'front-loaded' to protect front-line services and vulnerable residents.

West Sussex Lib Dems’ budget amendment will protect services such as Adult Social Care, Youth Services, Vulnerable Children and Bus services

Liberal Democrats on West Sussex County Council are horrified by the swingeing cuts proposed by the Conservative Cabinet in the budget that will come before the Council on Friday.

Although the Liberal Democrats recognise that these are difficult financial times, they believe that some of the choices made by the Conservatives are just plain wrong.

Commenting, County Councillor Mrs Morwen Millson, West Sussex Liberal Democrat group leader said:

“We believe that in choosing to reduce spending over three years, rather than the four years the Coalition Government expects, West Sussex Conservatives will be causing considerably more pain than necessary to some of the most vulnerable of our residents. It is appalling that they intend to take away personal care services from thousands of elderly residents and those with learning difficulties, to remove the subsidies on vital bus services, and to demolish the rest of the youth service, without spending enough time to fully consider other alternatives

“In addition, some of the cuts in subsidy for public transport could cause traffic chaos, with subsidised discretionary school services in line for cuts. For example, four school services in Horsham involve 80,000 pupil journeys a year to school. If these services are withdrawn, many parents will drive their children to school, causing misery for thousands of residents, gridlock for people trying to get to work and increased air pollution.

“Our budget would even the cuts out over the four years required by the government. In the first year, 2011/12, there would be no cuts to care services for adults, and a much-reduced impact on mental health and learning disability services. Proposed cuts to the youth service, to services for vulnerable children, bus subsidies and the introduction of a £50 charge for the young people’s 3-in-1 concessionary scheme for bus transport would be delayed at least one year. This would allow time for further work to identify better ways of saving money.

“We don’t understand the logic of making the cuts over three years instead of four. Liberal Democrats can only guess that the Conservatives aim to build up a war chest of cash with which to try to bribe the electorate at the next council elections in 2013.

“If this Conservative budget goes through, it will be a disaster for the very people the Council is there to protect. Frail older people, those on low incomes, people with learning difficulties and young people whose services will be cut into the bone by this budget cut, on top of last year’s, will be particularly hit – the Conservatives should be ashamed of themselves!”

Text of Liberal Democrat amendment:

County Council – 11^th February 2011

Agenda item 6 – Performance Framework and Revenue Budget and

Capital Programme 2011 – 15 

Amendment by the Liberal Democrat Group

No-one can be in any doubt that these are difficult times for public services and that the local Government finance settlement requires significant cuts.  However, we believe it would be in the interests of the residents of West Sussex to re-profile the proposed savings over the 4 year life of the current Spending Review rather than the 3 years of the County Council’s administration.

Doing otherwise will incur unnecessary redundancy costs, is unlikely to phase out or remodel services smoothly and will reduce opportunities to secure recurring savings in partnership with other organisations.

Given the very difficult times and the costs of administering and distributing additional grants, we propose to delete the sum in the budget for the Big Society, and instead concentrate our resources on our priorities. We propose that this sum be added to the Adult Services budget to support frail elderly people.

I therefore propose that the recommendations set out in the budget papers be amended as follows.

The amendment retains the same net expenditure of £501.569m for 2011/12, but reduces the savings needed to £33m, as set out below, to be funded £4.69m from reserves, which we believe are set at an over pessimistic level, in particular in view of the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government current position on local government reserves.

Capital Budget

Paragraph 20 on page 319 of the Council booklet states that the County Council has an additional £51m of un-ringfenced capital grants but has lost £8m in ringfenced grants for schools, leaving a net £43m gain.  Of this £4.88m has been added to the Highways capital programme under Structural Maintenance and £10m has been included in the Children's capital programme under 2 headings £8.5m for schools maintenance and £1.5m for Basic Need provision which leaves a figure of £36.6m unallocated at this present time.

It seems to us that the government intends this additional capital funding to stimulate economic growth in the county. We therefore think it is wrong for the administration to bank this much needed funding, when there are so many overdue projects across the county and the local economy remains sluggish.

We propose therefore that investment begins immediately, with the priorities being new Fire Stations for Horsham and Crawley, both phases of the special school at Burgess Hill, a West Sussex mortuary and works to reduce the carbon footprint, including at some of our schools.

13/02/2011

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