This week, with the Prime Minister and his cabinet, we have seen what happens when your leadership team do not work well together. Instead of focussing on what the country and its citizens need, they are now falling out with each other and fighting amongst themselves, rather than focussing on moving us all forward. The current parliamentary lead party are not tackling the financial problems which are clearly at the root of most of the issues that this country is facing – with inflation, instability from Brexit, and the rising costs of fuel prices, there just isn’t enough to go around and there are clearly parts of our country have been neglected for years, by successive governments.
I can certainly say that the governance of Wokingham Borough Council is rather different. We agree that we cannot do everything that we would like to do, because we just don’t have the money to do so. We have to be able to agree and prioritise what is really needed for our residents and provide stability, while listening and being patient when people who are unhappy about the difficult decisions we have to make. We try to work with groups, political parties, residents and even those who disagree with us, trying to find a consensus and move things forward in a positive direction.
I am immensely proud that in our local elections, the residents of Wokingham did not choose to vote for people and parties that promote division and were only offering vague solutions and ideas of what they might do differently. Strangely, some of those parties are already part of the Council and are very much included in the decision-making processes that the Council makes, but rather than asking questions and offering ideas in our council meetings they choose just to attack the decisions in their political literature instead.
In short, Wokingham Borough Council is loosing £43m over the next three years, mainly through central government taking a bigger slice of our business rates. This year, the current government have increased their share of our Business Rates and will take 94%, using it elsewhere in the country. I completely understand that we have a lot of big businesses here, but those businesses have the expectation that their business rates are spent locally, improving the roads and services that they need to operate their businesses at its best.
While the Labour government are saying they are giving us bigger grants for some things – the bottom line once the business rates are taken away, it leaves the Council a lot less to provide the services our residents need. But, we have to meet that challenge – on top of the over £30m of savings that have been made, since the Liberal Democrats took over Wokingham Borough Council and I am confident that we will.
Despite this and on the positive side, we are still moving the Wokingham Borough Council area forward. We are building SEND schools, new Sixth-Form units, new roads and infrastructure. Projects such as building our new Solar Farms involve many players, are complex and problematic, but they are fully expected to bring a good stable income, once built. I think that with the current events in the middle east, most of our residents will agree that removing ourselves from fossil fuel dependency is the way forward.
These are things that we are already doing for our residents here in Wokingham.
Cllr Imogen Shepherd-Dubey, Executive Councillor for Finance & Governance
