Barry Stamps Political Diary

Earlier this week Mike Heenan – the Council’s Cabinet member for Resources - was quoted in the press as saying that because the Council was facing a £1Million budget deficit he could not rule out future job cuts or reduction in services if “unreasonably high” increases in Council Tax were to be avoided. Indeed regular readers of these pages will remember I prediction last month that services would need to be cut or charges increased if the Council's looming budget gap was to be bridged! (14th September)

Well today two interesting items appeared in my post from the Council.

Firstly the Members Digest had a Cabinet report on the Council’s Financial Plan for each year until 2012/13. This makes extremely bleak reading as it shows the budget deficit rising year on year until it reaches over £1.7Million in 2012/13. It will certainly take a lot of job cuts and massive reductions of services if this gap is to be made up!

Also in the post was the latest edition of a full colour, eight page, glossy magazine the Council had produced for its staff. While I certainly think staff deserve to be kept informed of Council activities I do wonder whether producing a magazine of this quality was the right ting to do. Currently the Council are experimenting with paperless meetings, and have recently written to everyone who gets a Members Digest - including all the Parish Council’s in the area - asking if they would prefer to have it sent electronically so that the Council could save the cost of the paper and printing. Surely in a time when the Council needs to save money the same thing could be done with the staff newsletter which could be e-mailed to everyone's desk at very little cost!

I’ll certainly be asking questions as to how much these gloss magazines are costing and whether the money the Conservative Cabinet have spent in producing them would not be better spent on ensure services to the public are maintained!