Tories offer up a Budget of Cuts and a lack of ambition

The Warwickshire County Council’s Conservative budget passed at Full Council last week is full of cuts to front-line services, an increase in council tax and future redundancies for Warwickshire County Council staff.

The Conservative administration at Warwickshire County Council will again increase council tax by 3.99%, which is the maximum amount prohibited from central government. Central government has allowed local authorities to levy a 2% council tax to provide additional ring-fenced resources to fund adult social care services. In addition, WCC require an increase of 1.99% on the council tax for all other services too. This increase amounts to £1.10 per week for a Band D dwelling.

Despite this increase the Tory budget sets to make more cuts to front line services. Furthermore, the budget leaves open the possibility of even more cuts if necessary. The 20/21 budget is set to deliver £6.2 million of budget reductions in 2020/21, increasing to £33.3 million by 2025, claiming it will do so ‘through better procurement, improvements in efficiency, increased income and delivering reductions in demand.’ Such cuts will come from key frontline services and affect the most vulnerable people within Warwickshire.

The budget report, debated at WCC Full Council this Tuesday, cuts more jobs at the County. With just under a third of the Authority’s spending each year is on staffing, the Tories are set to instigate another round of redundancies at WCC to create ‘a reduction in the number of posts…it has to be recognised, some redundancies will be necessary, resulting in a need to fund redundancy costs.’ The budget fund for redundancies is now £9.1 m which was roughly £17m a number of years ago. This money has been used to pay for people to be made redundant, in order to save money.

Leader of the Labour Group, Richard Chattaway commented, ‘once again the conservative controlled county council are putting internal structures above the people of Warwickshire who they are supposed to be caring for. This budget provides very little respite to some of the most vulnerable people within our county and furthermore, oversees the destruction of our internal road network.’

Helen Adkins, Deputy Leader of the Labour Group commented, ‘yet again this is a budget which lets down the people of Warwickshire and asks Warwickshire people to pay more for less. Our budget was ambitious and had within it many good ideas about how to solve the problems the County faces in relation to SEND and Climate Change. Non of these were taken up and the Tories again stick to their lack of ambition.