Hounslow's 2012/13 Budget Passed - Zero Council Tax Increase, and a growth fund for Improvements

Tonight's Council meeting ended with the passing of Hounslow's 2012/13 budget.

•  - Council Tax Freeze for the 6th succesive year
• -  a £2m growth fund to deliver our pledges, and improve efficiencies

The Government has cut £62m from our overall budget over four years, and they will impose more in future years as they intend to continue to make the public sector pay for their failed deficit reduction policies.  Despite the challenge we  set a budget that achieves the required savings and allows for growth. There will be no closure of children’s centres or other services..The £16m savings for the next financial year are all efficiency savings -  such as on assets, contracts, shared services, transport and staff restructuring.

We have also created an element of growth:
-headroom to support growth in jobs and support for those needing  good quality work opportunities.  With 3 staff Hounslow must have the smallest Economic Development team, with no capacity to attract investment in borough and little scope to support to the vibrant but often fragile small business community
- better support to those 100s of families being tipped into real poverty as a result of this Governments tax and benefits policies. We are beginning to see the impact of some of these, and the Universal Credit will further exacerbate it.  Better advice and support, fair and affordable loans, good quality training.
- Investing in improvements to childrens and older people's services to better serve the most vulnerable in Hounslowl
- an Improvement fund that can be drawn on to invest in IT, training, re-organising and changing systems and processes to provide better run services, at lower cost to residents and the tax-payer.

All this on top of the achievements of the last year:

• no closure of children’s centres
• Transforming and modernising our processes
• Recruited 10 additional police officers and over 100 special constables,
• schools results continue to improve and remain above national average
• 330 Reception places 60 year 1 last September and another 90 next September.
• 1000 affordable homes completed or under construction, and 50 empty homes
• Grimebusters hotline
• Improvements to Hounslow Town Centre and the Masterplan agreed,
• Vacated 10 buildings to ensure better use of fewer buildings.
• Supporting those in Debt by funding the CSB to provided new and extended services,
• Innovation Grants for the voluntary sector
• A dedicated Olympics officer to ensure the borough makes the most of the Games coming to London

The Tory opposition had, for the first time brought along an alternative budget. They proposed a cut of £23.99 for a band D tax payer, around 50p a week.  They criticised us for tokenism when we did the same when in opposition.   Their budget deleted Labour's growth options, and made the mistake of suggesting a one-off VAT refund could be used for recurrent spending.  Sadly their lack of financial literacy was exposed at this point - you cannot fund recurrent costs from a one-off source.   In the end they supported half of the recommendations in the budget paper, and voted against the other half.

Leader Jagdish Sharma said  “We can look forward to a year of investment and progress - a year when our staff  earn the London Living Wage as a minimum,, when we’ll see the Hounslow town centre masterplan start to become a reality, when we will open our new Sandbanks resource centre with new residential and day places for older people, and we will build further on the good progress we have made on our pledges.”

Hounslow's Labour Budget 2011/12

The Labour-led Council set the budget with no increase in Council tax at the start of March. However with a grant cut from government for the first time since before 1997, we are forced to make £18m of cuts and savings – it has been the worst budget ever.

We know that savings have to be made to address the national deficit, a deficit triggered by the international banking crisis.   But Mr Pickles’ response to local Councils can be summarised as cutting too far, too fast and grossly unfairly 

Our budget for Hounslow reduces as much as possible the level of direct service cuts – and protects our services for the most vulnerable, those that keep people safe, and help people back into jobs. 

We are:

·       Building 300 new Council homes, as part of 1200 affordable homes in the pipeline now working towards our pledge of 2500 new affordable homes.

·       Launching a dedicated grime-busters phone-line to report fly-tipping and graffiti

·       Launching 100 uniformed officers on the streets and CCTV in crime hotspots

·      Retaining Childrens Centres, so investing in Children at the start of their lives, and investing in new school places

·       Working with employers to deliver  training and new jobs

·       Investing in the CAB to provide much-needed high-quality advice to those affected by the various benefit changes and struggling with housing or debt issues.

·       Improving services through a Modernisation fund to get better value for money for taxpayers in a time of reduced funding. 

·      Getting our buildings working harder – fewer of them, used throughout the week, accessible, energy efficient and near to where people are. 

Following the all-borough consultation we withdrew proposals to cut the youth service, to close libraries until after a full review, and decided not to cut the street cleaning and the school crossing patrols.

However the closure of some day centres will continue – these were part of a long-term programme to provide more appropriate and less institutionalised services to elderly and disabled residents and specialist support to those with dementia

 We are  working with other Councils and other organisations across West London to share services and pool back-room costs.  These are already bringing some savings.

On budget night the Tories couldn’t even provide viable amendments, let alone an alternative budget, and they were all over the place in the Council debate

There is no doubt that this has been an incredibly difficult time for the Labour Group.  Cuts mean having to make around 150 posts redundant, some will have to take compulsory redundancy – not something that we got elected to do. But to refuse to make a budget would mean Eric Pickles forcing a budget on this borough.

 We now start planning the 2012/13 budget, where we are expected to need to make another £18m savings.

Budget Farce

Tuesday night we had an intersting night where Phil Andrews claimed independence (from the Tories) for less than half an hour.
The budget proposed by the Conservatives was originally voted down.
After a 20 minute break, it emerged that £250,000 was to be made available for unspecified 'community uses'. The ICG leadership then supported the budget.
This was a shoddy deal with no indication as to where the money would come from or what it was going to be spent on. It just proves that the
Conservatives and the ICG are happy to waste residents' money in order
to please themselves. If this money was available, why isn't it being spent on proper public services? They are wasting residents' money while services get worse.

The rest of the Tory cuts remained, with the exception of the removal of the school uniform grants, and the subsidy for community use of school buildings. Lets hope there's still some admin staff available to administer the grants to the families on very low incomes who really need help with these costs.

Tories Reveal Cuts Proposals

At Hounslow's Council Meeting on Tuesday night night the Tories revealed the £8m cuts they want to make to the Council budget for the next financial year. These include direct attacks on front-line services to the most vulnerable families. Specific cuts we said should be ruled out now even before scrutiny were:

• The ending of school uniform grants to families on very low incomes
• The ending of the subsidy for community use of school premises,
• Cuts to council funding on children’s centres, play and youth activity
• Reducing social care funding for disabled or vulnerable children.

All the “savings” proposals will go to Scrutiny meetings over the next few weeks, and we will be looking at each to assess the impact to residents. The Tories have said the proposals will go out to public consultation, but we saw no programme for this at the Council meeting.

Tuesday's cuts proposals are in addition to the ending of £1/2m subsidy for the Hounslow Language Service which we opposed last March. This has had to be delayed as the Executive had not consulted on it before proposing it. We are demanding to know where the £1.5m redundancy cost for the teachers who will lose their jobs will come from.

All this emphasises the contempt the Tories have for vulnerable children and their families, as the really pernicious front-line cuts are in the Children’s services budget. What’s more we believe that direct service-level cuts shouldn’t be necessary if the Tories had not messed up their Performance Improvement Programme. A classic example was making a third of all admin staff redundant without properly assessing the impact on front-line staff - many of whom struggle with work-load and low morale.

The Independent Community Group who have been in coalition with the Tories since May 2006, distanced themselves from the Torie's budget. March's Council meeting will be interesting.