County Budget is CUTS not Investments

12.02.00am GMT Tue 1st Jan 2008

After 24 hours of reviewing the details in the Northamptonshire County Council budget announced at Wednesday's cabinet meeting Councillor Brian Hoare, Liberal Democrat County Leader declared that the findings revealed "it is a disinvestment budget and not an investment in services for the people as claimed by the Tory administration."

"0f the £35million of investment claimed by the Tories to improve services, £20million is in fact accounting adjustments to correct the errors in the 2007/08 budget where potential savings of £13million were not delivered and £7million is required to replace the reserves of the council used to support the 2007/8 budget leaving only."

"Another chicken that has come home to roost is the need to finance increasing interest costs of the Councils capital programme. The Liberal Democrats have warned the Tory administration that capitalising potential revenue expenditure since they came into office in 2005 was a short term solution and now the Tory administration are having to invest £9.6M over the next 4 years to support the capital programme. This is a loss of money to support our front line services."

"To balance the budget the Council still needs to make £10million of savings from the "Integrated Change Programme" and savings that the Tory administration admits they have yet to find. We would hope that one year on and a new management team in place the savings identified this year are more capable of being delivered but they still represent a risk to the council during this budget period."

"The Tory administration are claiming an additional £16m investment in services but failing to point out that had they accepted a council tax increase of 4.95% in the Liberal Democrat alternative budgets in the last two years they would have had an additional £7.5M more to invest in 2008/09 as well as the benefit in the previous two years."

"Tories claim that the public wanted low council tax increases and given a choice every one would want this. What the Tories never spelt out to the public if 2005 was that this would result in savage cuts affecting the services offered to the young and vulnerable.

In this 3rd Tory budget the public are seeing the results of false promises in 2005 and the poor management of the county council finances by the current Tory administration in the last 3 years."

The Tories Top Five Service Cuts:

1. Savings in Older People Social Care - Residential and Nursing Care Reduction in admissions to residential and nursing homes -£1,730,000

2. Modernisation of Learning Disability Day services which will lead to the closure of day care centres -£ 650,000

3. Savings in Older People Social Care - Long Term Home Care. Assumed reduction in long term home care -£ 266,000

4. Fieldwork Social Services- Reduction of funding that deals with family support and family resource centres -£ 250,000

5. Reduced subsidy of the bus network - less bus services subsidised - £200,000

(Information taken from "Draft Revenue Budget 2008 - 2009" pages 16 &17)