Our council was superb. Provided excellent services within budget, and had formed a strategic alliance with another such adjacent council in the next county. Even the council tax wasn't too bad.
All was good, everyone was happy. Proof if could be done if intelligence and prudence were in ample supply and petty political bickering kept at arms length from the actual business of service delivery.
Then they were forcibly merged with a failing council in our own county. The external strategic partner saw which way that would head and pulled out of the arrangement, and now our services are being dragged down and it seems possible that we'll be dragged into bankruptcy too.
So it can be done and done successfully, our original council was proof of that. They were managing very well within their budget. However, infecting successful councils with a cancer from a failing neighbour by forcibly merging them isn't the way to fix it.
Councils received a massive income hike in the 90s when rates gave way to council tax, with a brief stint of the PT in the middle. That increase has rarely been used wisely, and examples abound of financial and business ineptitude. That fact that there is a tranche of decent, well run councils providing effective services within budget shows that it can be done all over the UK, and that others fail to do so is down to three decades of mismanagement, not the income squeeze of recent years.
The failing councils almost universally have one thing in common. I won't use the P word, but it's their bickering, infighting, and insistence on ideology that brings them down.
Here's a question every elected councillor should ask themselves - "how does what I am about to do make a direct contribution to service delivery?" If the answer is not unabiguously positive then they should not do it. Read some council meeting minutes and you'll see why many are run so inefficiently, and it's little to do with the absolute budget itself.
Short of money? Then how can you afford fact finding trips to other councils or even abroad? How can you afford to pay contractors to manage service and take a 30% cut as profit? How can you vote a significant increase in councillors expense allowances? How can you waste 30 grand of a Christmas tree? How can you risk public money hjgh-risk investment funds that increasingly are failing to give the expected return?
Heres a good one. On my old beat, which was in the failed council area, they were ripping out old lamp posts and replacing them with new ones with a hinge that can be lowered to the ground, thus allowing serving and repair without the need for a ladder. I got chatting to a manager at one site and asked why they were doing it.
"Health and safety", was his reply.
"Oh, have you had folk falling off the ladders while changing the bulbs?"
"I've been with the department since 1959 and we don't have any records of a single injury received while up a ladder repairing a lighting column, but apprently its dangerous so we've been ordered to replace them all. "
Heaven save us from politicians.
