NOTEBOOK by BILL HEANEY
The fact that it costs council taxpayers hundreds of thousands of pounds to be recipients of it only makes it worse.
You wouldn’t pay for a newspaper or a bar of chocolate if you didn’t like it.
Or if the newspaper was full of mistakes and misinformation or the chocolate was fusty.
But you’ll have to keep forking out your council tax money to the denizens of Church Street or else find a Messenger at Arms at your door.
Savings and adjustments totalling £615,500 have been agreed as part of early work to close the Council’s £10.4 million budget gap.
The Council budget process has been undertaken at a time when West Dunbartonshire’s finest hope nobody’s looking.
They would have you believe that the aim behind what they are up to is “with a view to reducing spending while protecting jobs and services”.
And that the “budget gap” they refer to represents the difference between the Council’s income – your council tax and the money you pay which is not included in that, which is substantial and which poor families simply do not have money to meet.
This includes a lot of things including school meals and health and social care and leisure services for which you have to stump up or you don’t get in the door.
In truth, most of what you get – around 75 per cent of this – is met with Scottish Government funding, and this includes the cost of delivering services to communities.
The basket case council, like so many of the 32 local authorities and Oliver Twist himself are forever putting the poor mouth on it and asking for more.
It’s a costly and time-consuming business, but it’s the price we pay for democracy.
Ah, democracy. It’s a fragile flower casually stamped upon by our elected representatives, the local councillors, MPs and MSPs who would, like those of you with a brain in your head that isn’t lonely, agree not to ask too many questions about.
Persist in asking meaningful questions and you will find yourself banned or barred. I was myself thrown out of a meeting in the Burgh Hall for asking for the sound to be turned up so the press and public could hear what was going on, as is their right. They accused me of interupting their meeting but that’s a lie.
At another meeting in Church Street this week, councillors discussed a finance update report which said the first tranche of options and management adjustments developed by officers in order to help them make the cuts they think are necessary to take them out of debt.
Following an excruciatingly boring debate, savings – that is cuts – which will generate £52,000 rising to £61,000 by 2027/28 were approved, in addition to management adjustments – that is more cuts decided not by elected members but by officials – amounting to £564,000, rising to £691,000 by 2027/28 were passed.
No wonder the administration, whetever its political colour, is so often accused of leaving it to the officials to run the council.
It was what usually happens. If you always do what you always did then you always get what you always got which, in West Dunbartonshire, is deprivation; children living in poverty with homeless parents; damp, unfit for purpose social housing; residents being forced to use food banks; education services which have high levels of truancy and to which literacy and numeracy are changes. Then there’s the sewage in the rivers and even the streets. The list goes on …
Contrast this to what the Council decided its priorities were on Monday night.
Changes agreed at the meeting included a review of allotment fees and an increase in special uplift charges – carting off old sofas – “to reflect the resource required to carry out collections, and ensure the service continues to operate efficiently to improve residents’ experience”.
In addition, it was agreed the Council would revise legal fees for parties purchasing or leasing property from the organisation, in order to bring Council legal fees in line with the equivalent commercial rates charged by the private sector for work of a similar complexity.
While they don’t embrace the private sector then, it seems they wouldn’t mind being part of it.
Management adjustments – they keep using these two words instead of cuts – include a redesign of the leadership model for Professional Development and Children’s Services Teams within Education, in order “to make it run more efficiently while continuing to support pupils and employees”.
That sentence contains a clear admission that Education, like so much else the council touches, does not run efficiently.
Just think. The Council could have saved all that money that has been squeezed out of this deprived community by dispensing with the cost and time involved in all of the above by adopting Parkinson’s Law and using common sense.
Parkinson’s Law by the way is that work expands to meet the time (and money) allocated to whatever task it is you are assigned.