Cornwall Council’s Budget

While George Osborne was standing up in Parliament outlining the misery which lies in store for (nearly) everyone in Britain over the next six years, Cornwall Council was staging its own equivalent at New County Hall – the Tory-led administration’s budget.

To be fair to him, the Leader of the Council did attempt to sound a little more upbeat than the Chancellor but he was working with pretty thin gruel. It’s hard to make a package which includes losing half the bus routes, closing half the toilets and accelerating the decline of the road network sound attractive, but he was keen to try.

We heard much about how “bold” and “brave” the administration had been in “going deep and going early” (although not a great deal about how the switch to unitary status had saved them from slashing public services even further) and there was a fairly shameless attempt to take credit for a number of schemes which had been put in place by Cornwall Council’s predecessor authorities. The problem was that we learned very little about what the Council’s coalition (or “shared administration” as one Indie Cabinet Member was at pains to point out) actually plans to do over the coming months.

We shouldn’t be surprised about that. There has never been a meaningful policy statement from the administration, no matter how many times we’ve asked. Some months ago I asked the Leader if there was a ‘big idea’ at the heart of the Tory-led Cabinet. All he was able to do was shrug his shoulders and mutter something about “managing the crisis”.

And there lies the beating heart of this administration. They are managers, and not especially gifted ones at that. The “go early, go deep” plan didn’t come from them, it came from the senior directors who spend so much of their time spoon-feeding the Cabinet (to recycle a phrase from one of their leading lights). The drive for a Stadium for Cornwall (whether you like the idea or not) is an officer project, as is the Cornish EMA plan.

All the Cabinet have to do is make sure they are asking the right questions of the officers. Unfortunately part of the backdrop of this year’s budget has been their failure to do even that. Car parking revenue was a disaster they were collectively unable to prevent – despite warnings from us and others – as was the situation with the bus routes; they made a mistake with last year’s Adult Care budget which had to be hastily corrected this time around (they even had the brass neck to try to put a positive spin on this); and two weeks ago the Leader was unable to answer my simple question about the level of Council Tax for the coming year. Nothing especially “bold” or “brave” in any of that.

To help out we put forward four amendments. Firstly, we proposed that the Council accepts the grant from central government designed to deliver a Council Tax freeze this year. Secondly, we proposed a grant pot to help set up community bus projects when we find out the full scale of the administration’s calamity on this. Thirdly, we called for a scheme to protect and enhance Cornwall’s harbours. Finally, we proposed that any material changes to the budget should be examined by the Council’s Scrutiny Committees rather than simply being nodded through by someone in the top floor bunker.

Happily the administration accepted all of these points, although it turns out that it was only because senior officers recommended that they did. Nevertheless, we were at least able to put some clarity into a budget which otherwise asks more questions than it answers.

Of course, the budget was passed. The Tories were whipped into line and the Indies, in spite of their earlier rumblings of discontent, largely fell into line when the vote was called. Nevertheless, it remains a budget of unknowns. There are still far too many unanswered questions contained within – let’s just hope that when the answers come, they aren’t as disastrous as this year’s were for the buses, the public toilets, the car parks, the road network and Cornwall’s forgotten rural communities.