Sound financial management?
Today the council wrote-off debts totalling £488,218.7 Sadly, councillors receive notices of debt write-offs like this on a fairly frequent basis. Apparently, this month’s council-tax write-off is an improvement of ‘1.46% compared with the same period in the previous year’. The vast bulk of this money represents people moving home and leaving debts behind.
At the same time the Lead Member has approved a contract for the council’s street lighting power that represents a 25% price hike for our electricity for the year (that’s an extra £239,040).
The council’s budget, which Labour and the Independents forced through in February, listed Budget Assumptions that included, as a ‘key assumption’, price inflation of:
- ‘5% for utility and insurance costs’.
Last year’s key assumption on price inflation was:
- ‘5% for gas/electricity costs’.
So we’ve budgeted for increased costs of £47,808 and will end up paying £191,232 on top of this. This money is coming out of our Highways Budget.I wonder just what Highways Projects will have to be cut thanks to this budgeting underestimate? Not so long ago I asked how much had been spent in the past few years on fixing potholes on Dorchester Rd. in Swinton (it’s a glamorous life being a councillor) – it turned out that 71 pothole repairs had cost approximately £44 per pothole to repair (and around £10,000 less than resurfacing would have cost). So, let’s hope that this massive underestimate doesn’t end up meaning some 4300 odd potholes don’t get repaired this year.
How on earth is the council getting it so wrong?