By Cllr Andy Croy
What an astonishing piece from Conservative Leader Pauline Jorgensen last week.
It was like a peek into an alternative, fantastical universe where reality was bent with the gaze of the onlooker. Pauline really seems to have found another Looking Glass to peer through.
Unfortunately, it is quicker and easier to say something that is so demonstrably wrong than it is to demonstrate why it is wrong.
The disastrously comedic alternative budget presented by the Conservatives earlier this year is a case in point.
The Borough Council’s Chief Finance Officer (CFO) wrote of Conservative budget proposals, “I can however conclude that they [the proposals] would add substantial risk, for the reasons set out above, to a Substantive Budget Proposal that already contains considerable risks and challenges.”
No councillor in their right mind would vote for proposals with that description, let alone continually refer back to them as though the proposals were credible.
The officer noted that the last Conservative budget in 2022 had included projected savings and incomes challenge of £5.1 million and on top of this the current budget had increased this to £11.8m.
With this background the Conservatives had tried to find another £2.2 million of savings, with one-third of this coming from “remove overhead growth”.
This innocuous line translates into not recruiting essential staff. Not recruiting the extra social workers we need. Not recruiting the staff who work with our most vulnerable children. Not recruiting staff who work with our most vulnerable adults.
These roles are not the “nice to haves” these roles are essential to treating people with the dignity and respect they have a right to.
And we know the Conservatives wanted to freeze the recruitment of essential workers as they complained about the number of roles the Council was recruiting both in the meeting and in letters to this paper.
The Conservatives also included £350,000 of car park ‘savings’ based on them not understanding the numbers presented in the budget.
But that was human error.
What was desperation was the £70,000 saving they thought would happen if WBC maintained the current mediocre and expensive waste collection regime.
They did not consider that the new regime of weekly food waste collections, coupled with wheelie bins and recycling, is anticipated to deliver savings of over £1 million per year, every year.
Setting a saving of £70,000 against a saving of £1 million coupled with increased recycling and choosing the former, is so very Liz Truss. It makes no sense.
Diplomatically, the Council CFO wrote: “Yhere are also some savings in the Budget Amendment that appear to either relate to special items or are not currently included in the base budget.”
There is not much I can add to that except to reiterate how embarrassed I was for the Conservatives to have to read it in Council.
Pauline’s article also revealed yet another Conservative policy on car parking charges this year.
Firstly, the policy was to, and I paraphrase, “to look at the new charges”. Concurrently with this they had a petition to “reverse all the charges”. I challenged Pauline on the lack of coherence in her promising to “look at” charges while simultaneously her councillors were asking people to sign a petition to “reverse” charges.
The Conservatives then agreed it would be better to have just the one policy and that the leader should know the policy.
On this basis – “reversing charges” – the Conservatives fought the local elections. Now, just four months later, we seem to have a new policy – pledging to increase charges “once the local economy has recovered” and annual increases afterwards and only reversing the £1 evening charge and the charge for parking on Sundays.
It is both exhausting trying to keep up and frustrating that this column does not allow me the space to properly reality-check Pauline’s fantasy finances.
Cllr Andy Croy is Labour councillor for Bulmershe and Whitegates ward on Wokingham Borough Council
