Cllr. Steve Cooke

There’s an intriguing item in Salford’s list of efficiency saving for this year’s budget (for efficiency savings you can often read ‘cuts to services’ or ‘increase in charges’). In amongst some truly worrying items, like increased costs for already stretched local schools, and cuts to domestic care for those who struggle to care for them selves, is a proposal to save £30k by reducing refreshments in committee rooms.

Proposal A2 – Reduce supplies and services expenditure on Administration, item (3) Democratic Services – reduce refreshments in committee rooms £30k.

This saving will be achieved in the following way: “cease providing biscuits for all meetings and only provide drinks for members and external visitor meetings”.

Firstly – how in the world have the council been spending £30k per year on biscuits? And how is it that staff are forbidden coffee and tea during their meetings, but councillors can have it?

A quick Google reveals the 300g packet of Hobnobs retails from 59-85p. A 100 pack of six different kinds of assorted mini biscuits of a similar kind to those eaten in the council sells for £22.26 (each pack contains 3 biscuits). So, that’s 50847 packets of Hobnobs, or 1347 catering packs (totalling 404312 biscuits per year or 11080 biscuits per day – including weekends).

Obviously the numbers of slightly frivolous – I’ve not included the cost of staff or of tea and coffee; so I doubt that eleven thousand biscuits are really consumed each day in Salford Council. However, the point is very far from frivolous – how can the council have been spending this much money on tea and biscuits whilst they have for years underfunded key services like Youth Services?

This entry was posted on Friday, February 5th, 2010 at 10:23 pm and is filed under Council Work, Local Issues. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.