The Joint Administration (JA) have made their decision to charge for green waste collection, despite our fight and the petition that ended up with over 6,000 signatories. They haven’t listened and they have created a story that has more holes than a sieve!
Over 6,000 Signatures us a difficult task, and I thank Tom Gosling for organising this. To put this number in context, The JA put out a consultation about their “budget principles” which would be used to determine the budget for the whole council. This consultation only got 800 responses. They listened to 800 people on something as important as the budget but didn’t listen to 6,000 signatories who wanted to give their view on the biggest cut to HDC services in its history. There is no mandate for this cut in services, and no JA Councillor had this as part of their manifesto.
We had, and still have, loads of questions that haven’t been answered because they are more concerned about playing cheap party-political point scoring, at times verging into the condescending, disrespectful, and patronising. Below are the links to the 2 Overview and Scrutiny Panels, I really wouldn’t recommend watching but they are hear if you want to:
- https://www.youtube.com/live/lg0n6xbriB0?si=Ny2ehwykhk_NN1S2
- https://www.youtube.com/live/-IqOon4VQKk?si=4yJ9UgJ5-6biAVDO
The JA are currently pushing that there is a multi-million pound “deficit”, which has been challenged by Cllr Andy Jennings (Shadow Cabinet Member for Finance) with no substantive response. What the JA are calling a “deficit” is actually a “budget gap”. It is common for a council to have a budget gap over their MTFS (Medium Term Financial Strategy) of 5 years. In my experience, I have seen councils with budget gaps in the £100 millions We are being told the budget gap is around £8 million.
So, what service is the money they raise from this charge going to go? The councils’ reserves, over £5 million is planned to go from this scheme into the reserves. I do not sign up to the project fear they are trying to peddle.
The fight continues.
