By Clive Jones
Returning to council duties after a period of illness, I’m struck by the wish of residents for positive messages, especially in these difficult times.
In an election campaign, the temptation is often to attack your opponents for what you perceive are their mistakes or weaknesses. Unfortunately, this tendency can sometimes degenerate into deliberately false or misleading claims and wholly negative campaigning.
Most residents don’t want to hear about our views of our opponents; they want to know what we have to offer. Positive, campaigning, is we believe what most people want to hear.
In that spirit, I want to set out the local Lib Dem stall and suggest why you should vote for Lib Dem candidates in next month’s borough council elections.
We can point to a track record of achievement over the last year running the council as a minority administration.
We set a balanced budget in the most challenging circumstances anyone can remember, with double-digit inflation, rising demand for services, shortfalls in anticipated income, and higher interest rates that increase the cost of servicing the council’s borrowing.
Many other council’s have not succeeded in setting a safe budget in such difficult financial conditions and the government has taken over the running of their council, imposing much higher council tax increases and inflicting deep cuts in services. Through prudent financial management and making tough decisions, we have avoided that fate.
We have set the council on a new course of better and more effective partnership working with a wide range of external bodies – including town and parish councils, the voluntary sector, local businesses, schools, Reading University, police, fire service and health providers.
We have worked with our partners in the Hardship Alliance to target help on those MOST IN NEED in our community, both young and old during this cost-of-living crisis.
We have allocated funds to provide free school meals during school holidays for children in receipt of free school meals in term time as well as assisting pensioners and hard pressed families with financial help with their Council Tax.
We have secured funding to enable the council to build two new Special Educational Needs (SEND) schools in the borough. A service that is desperately needed for many of our children and their parents. Many who travel long distances for their education.
We have worked with our local schools to ensure that at least 96% of new entrants have been offered a place at one of their preferred schools. The highest level for several years.
We have agreed with the Polehampton Trust, a lease of the historic Old Boys’ School and are converting this into a new and permanent library and community hub, which has saved this building for Twyford and its surrounding villages.
We have begun the long-overdue process of imposing greater financial and management control over the council’s contracts with external providers, to secure improvements in such areas as highways, where our predecessors had an arrangement that turned out to be disadvantageous to the council and to road users. This has led to little or no financial checks on road repairs over the last three years. Our aim is to improve value for money for our hard-pressed Council Tax-payers and road users.
We have lobbied government to reduce the housing allocation that it has imposed on the borough, which we believe is unsustainable. We appear to have been making progress, hopefully an announcement is imement that the government will allow us to take into account past over-provision, which will reduce the housing target quite significantly, possibly by a figure close to 2000.
But our case is not just based on what we have managed to do, in the most difficult circumstances, over the last year. It rests also on what we can offer in the future.
If we are re-elected, we will continue to provide calm and measured leadership, making decisions on the basis of evidence, not emotion and prejudice.
We will seek to work with all those in our community who are themselves contributing so much to make the borough such a special place to live and work. The partnership agenda, which we have furthered over the last year, will be developed further, to make council decision making less top-down and more bottom-up – more a reflection of the community’s priorities. We can work so much better together.
We will continue to work to ensure that every local child gets a place in one of their preferred schools.
Lib Dem councillors have a justified reputation for hard work and service to their local communities. If you elect, or re-elect, a Lib Dem councillor you will find them champions of your area and committed to making life better for all those they represent.
Cllr Clive Jones is the leader of Wokingham Borough Council and ward member for Hawkedon. He is not up for re-election this year.
