Andrew votes to deliver a balanced budget
Last Thursday Full Council passed the 2023/24 Budget.
On Thursday last week, I supported the budget moved by my ward colleague, Cllr. Stuart Sullivan (Con, Billericay East), Cabinet Member for Resources & Commercial.
Stuart has been a councillor for twice as long as I have - and I was elected 10 years ago in June - but I have certainly never been through a budget-setting as difficult as this one and, although he will receive precious little thanks, I do want to commend Stuart and the professional officers at the Council on the exceptionally challenging task they have been faced with.
There will be plenty in this budget that people are unhappy about but it should not be underestimated how difficult it has been, under the present circumstances, to deliver a balanced budget when the Council is being hit with the same rising costs as everyone else. The headline, of course, is that we are putting up Council Tax by 2.97%, which none of us are remotely happy about but is as low as we could realistically keep it without making substantial cuts to services.
As Stuart rose to his feet on Thursday to formally move the Budget at Full Council, he was doing so almost exactly a year to the day since Vladimir Putin invaded the Ukraine. As Stuart pointed out in his speech, at that time the Council was forecasting a budget gap of a little over £1 million, which we were confident we could deal with but today that budget gap is over £3 million. Nobody could have predicted this insane and vicious war, which has ruined so many lives in ways more devastating than we can probably imagine from here in the relative comfort of Britain – and all our thoughts and prayers must continue to go out to the valiant Ukrainian people as they carry on their brave resistance to Putin’s senseless war.
"There will be plenty in this budget that people are unhappy about but it should not be underestimated how difficult it has been, under the present circumstances, to deliver a balanced budget when the Council is being hit with the same rising costs as everyone else."
But there is no getting around the fact that, coupled with the ongoing economic aftershocks of the Covid pandemic, the cost of this war, in terms of energy prices, fuel, disruption to supply chains and other squeezes to the cost of living around the world, means residents across the Borough of Basildon are hurting. None of us wants to add to those burdens any more than absolutely necessary but, even with all our efficiency savings (and Stuart has identified more than £2 million worth) and the additional support we are receiving from Central Government (including but not limited to a 10.1% increase in Business Rates support, as well as a funding guarantee that ensured no authority receives a settlement less than 3% more than last year), if Basildon Council is to balance the books and protect core services, it does mean councillors putting on their ‘big boy pants’ and taking some tough, even unpalatable decisions.
Charging for garden waste is something many of you have contacted me about and I am grimly aware most of you are not at all happy about it. We are not happy about it either. It is something we have resisted for years. Garden waste collection is a statutory service but one that, unlike other waste and recycling, the legislation does permit councils to charge for (and, indeed, more than 65% of local councils already do so). But we have always known it would be a 'tough sell', so to speak, because the service has always traditionally been included in our standard service paid for through the Council Tax. People, we know, will feel that they are being in some way 'double charged' but, the reality is, the Council Tax you pay now is simply not going to cover the increased costs of delivering the service. In the past, we have always managed to avoid adding a charge. We found savings elsewhere. But this was just not possible this time around. It becomes a question of how best to continue providing a service that is transparent and sustainable. On that basis, I have to say, I do happen to think a subscription service charged to the end-user is not inherently unfair. It is also what the majority of local authorities already do, so can hardly be called novel. I would still rather we did not have to do it, of course.
Another very difficult decision is switching the street lights back off. It is nearly 9 years since Essex County Council, who are responsible for street lighting, introduced their part-night lighting policy, switching the lights off between 1 and 5 a.m. Basildon Conservatives opposed it at the time and have always thought it was entirely wrong. In 2019, the then Labour-led Administration took the decision that they would pay E.C.C. to keep our lights on. This was always going to be hard to maintain and Conservatives raised hackles over this when it was announced. Ultimately, we voted in favour of it but with the caveat that it would need to be sustainable. Yet, as with so many things, Labour only budgeted for a year, paid out of reserves. It fell to poor old Stuart to put it on a proper financial footing and write it into the revenue. Sadly, with energy costs going up, it is no longer sustainable for the Council to pay.
"I have to say, I do happen to think a subscription service charged to the end-user is not unfair. It is also what the majority of local authorities already do, so can hardly be called novel. I would still rather we did not have to do it, of course."
These are all hard choices but they have allowed us to balance the budget. Nothing on earth would ever make me welcome a rise in Council Tax but I am still relieved we were able to show some restraint and keep it below 3% and not go for the full 5%, as I saw some of the usual talking heads on social media confidently predicting we would. I am also conscious that, for about 4 years running, we did actually freeze Council Tax – in fact I think there was even one year when we cut it! – so our track record on this, I hope, will give residents confidence that Conservatives will always keep taxes as low as possible and reduce it where possible.
As Cabinet Member for Housing, the bitterest pill for me personally was the rise in social rents by 7%. It was something I voted for with extreme reluctance. But the only real source of revenue the Housing Revenue Account has are the rents. I certainly do not claim any great facility with numbers and I am far from an economic wiz-kid but you do not have to be Adam Smith to know that when the Council's Chief Financial Officer shows you a graph showing what will happen to the H.R.A. if you do not raise rents by the full 7% and there is a line graph and the line drops off the bottom of the graph… I am clear that is not a good outcome! That is clearly not sustainable position for the H.R.A. and would not serve council tenants and is the difference between me being able to carry on with our house-build programme, carry on investing in repairs and renovating our housing stock and with our unprecedented investment through my flagship Safe & Sound estate improvement programme, and having to entirely gut the lot. These programmes are much-needed, are making a huge difference and, in all cases, have already been put off for far too long.
There was also much still to welcome in this budget. Despite the financial pressures, this Administration is not cutting core services and we are keeping up our ambitious programme of investments and improvements, including extensive investment in new play equipment in parks and play areas around Billericay, including at Lake Meadows, which will also be getting a new skate park. We are also putting £750,000 into maintenance of local community halls and £3.3 million to implement our forthcoming Car Parking Strategy to try and address the parking issues that increasingly bedevil our local communities. Our £40 million Safe & Sound programme will also continue.
"Despite the financial pressures, this Administration is not cutting core services and keeping up our ambitious programme of investments and improvements..."
So, ultimately, I voted in favour of this budget because I want to keep the core services on which my constituents and other residents rely on a stable footing. I also want to keep that investment in the fabric of our town and the significant investment we are making in parks and open spaces, including in my own ward of Billericay East. Works have already started in Lake Meadows and the public realm improvements that are coming to Billericay High Street represent much-needed investment in the town.
I am, of course, not happy with everything in the budget but I believe it does contain the measures necessary to safeguard the Borough’s long-term finances. Labour and Independent councillors must think so too, otherwise they would have moved an Alternative Budget. They spent a good couple of hours lambasting our budget on Thursday but, if they really thought these measures were not necessary and avoidable, they had access to the professional officers and could have set out, in detail, precisely how that could be achieved. This is exactly what the Conservative Group has always done whenever we have been in opposition, certainly for all of the time I have been a Conservative councillor. We never opposed a budget simply for the sake of opposition. We always spelled out precisely what we would have done differently - indeed, when we took back office in 2021, the first thing we did was hold an extraordinary meeting to implement an emergency budget, based on the alternative budget we had moved a few months earlier.
The legal maxim is Qui tacet consentiret - "Silence gives consent." It was not enough for Opposition members to vote against our Budget. They should have said what they would do! Instead, they turned up on the night having prepared nothing. Labour ended up flapping about, holding up the meeting by 40 minutes, like a bunch of schoolkids doing their homework at the last minute, sat in the Labour Group Room frantically gluing macaroni to bits of cardboard in the hopes of having something vaguely plausible to hand in to the teacher. In the end, what emerged was an incredibly feeble amendment that sought to do some minor tinkering that would have paid for one extra police officer and a park warden. No actual attempt to avoid the tax increase or the rent rise or the lights going out, or the green waste charging, or any of the other things they had spent the past two hours complaining bitterly about. We were all faintly staggered by this, though hardly surprised.
"Labour ended up flapping about, holding up the meeting by 40 minutes, like a bunch of schoolkids doing their homework at the last minute, sat in the Labour Group Room frantically gluing macaroni to bits of cardboard in the hopes of having something vaguely plausible to hand in to the teacher. In the end, what emerged was an incredibly feeble amendment that sought to do some minor tinkering..."
So this is not the budget that anybody wants but it is the balanced budget that the Borough needs.
You can read full details of the budget and watch the live webcast of the meeting here.
