Telford & Wrekin Borough Councillors have published their Alternative Budget. This has been passed by the Borough chief finance officer as being 'likely to balance and can therefore be considered as robust'.
Main points:-
- Borrowing - We would seek to reduce it. Under Labour debt has risen from £91.1m to £260m, & is expected to go higher.
- Much of the debt is speculative in commercial and residential property, thus putting the council at future risk.
- We would sell off the Solar Farm as well as the hundreds of houses the Authority is building for rent. (The solar tarrifs are not set in stone & can be changed).
- We would not close the libraries - Newport and Madely would be retained and the others the provision would change to the formation of a 'Public Service Mutual' vehicle as has been done successfully in other areas.
- We would invest £100,000 to enhance & protect rights of way.
- We support the Adult Social Care precept of 2%.
- We do not support the suggested raise of the council precept which would be added onto the Adult Social Care precept.
- Education - We have set aside £75k for an urgent revue of school places. Labour cut secondary school places and despite bulging primary schools and expansion of housing they have failed to collect any capital monies from housing developers to build new secondary schools.
- Telford Local Plan - We are against the current Labour administration's housing target of 15,555 new houses (we belive it to be unsustainable and a huge burden on infrastructure) when their own Housing Needs Survey has specified a much lower figure of 9,940. We have set aside £100k to fund a complete review of housing policy & the Local Plan. They are doing this to incease income (the New Homes Bonus and council tax) rather than for the welfare of Telford as a whole.
Labour are adopting some of our ideas:- Centralised recycling centre - we had this in our 2011 plans but it was cancelled by Labour who won the election. If it had gone ahead the Authority could have saved over half a million pounds to date.
They are also proposing to adopt the standard milage allowance for council officers based on the Inland Revenue rates. We recommended this repeatedly and had Labour implemented it there would have been a saving of £1million.
See the full Budget details below:-