Exeter Labour Council running out of credit
Your favourite Council cuts on a postcard please because we are now in it together! Labour's chickens are coming home to roost, and their leader, Pete Edwards, is in a flap. He is asking residents where to make cuts to save money. Try this, Pete. How about not spending £57000 on a consultation trying to pin the blame on the government. Perhaps look at the latest taxpayer funded Citizen newspaper headlining £750000 on a running track. How about not blowing the Council's assets and then spending £35 million pounds of borrowed money the Council never had, which has turned an annual investment income of £1.3 million in 2008 to an annual debt cost of £2.3 million in 2015. This switch is about £3.6 million per year off the services we used to enjoy, not far off the amount Pete wants us to find for him now.
It would be a bit embarrassing for Labour to admit that their extended and ongoing spending binge has caused this huge debt hangover, so they are blaming the government of course. Lots of Councils are getting less money, but not Exeter. Their dodgy circle graph (which shows one government grant shrinking by 3 times more than it actually does) fails to include the lucrative and growing New Homes Bonus pot, localised business rates, and other grants which means the Council's actual cash from the government over 4 years from 2011 was £9.77m, £9.81m, £10.23m & £11.68m. That's good for Exeter, but not enough to pay off Labour's credit card bill though.
What Labour could look at are the reserves piling up - since 2011 the reserves have risen by £6.14m. This is the secret battle fund to build a new £20m swimming pool, half of which is to be funded by, you guessed it, more borrowing! That's on top of another £10m borrowing already planned for other projects over the next three years. So if your street is a mess, you can get away from it all in a subsidised pool.
Labour are becoming politically impregnable in Exeter as people have used successive local elections to moan at the government or abstain and inadvertently installed a huge Labour majority that is either innumerate or wilfully profligate with our money. We have the fourth lowest Council tax in the country and are rapidly heading for the fourth worst services. All my figures are drawn from Executive minutes, publicly available but buried away deep in the City Council website. My consistent criticisms have been routinely ignored rather than challenged, perhaps because there is no effective response to them, so I look forward to a public debate. This is what people get when they let this particular Labour regime take over at local elections.