The Liberal Democrat Amendment to improve County services is below along with the speech by the LD Leader Councillor Keith House.

Investment in Hampshire’s Services, Investment in Hampshire’s Infrastructure

Hampshire Liberal Democrats Budget Proposals, February 2014

LIBERAL DEMOCRAT BUDGET AMENDMENT
HAMPSHIRE COUNTY COUNCIL – 20 FEBRUARY 2014

ITEM 9 – REVENUE BUDGET AND PRECEPT 2014/15 AND CAPITAL PROGRAMME 2014/15 TO 2016/17

Moved by Councillor House and seconded by Councillor Collett.

That the County Council approve the following amendments to the recommendations contained in Item 9 :

(c) The Revenue Budget for 2014/15 as set out in Appendix 8 to Annex A and Annexes 2 to 4 of this Part 1 report as amended by :
• The removal of the supporting people saving of £4.112M within Adult Services proposals (Appendix 6 of Annex A – reference AS8)
• The one off addition of £0.5M for developing new commercial services across the County Council, to be funded from the Invest to Save Reserve.
• The addition of £0.2M ongoing revenue to support the County’s lead Local Flood Authority role to further enhance co-ordination of flood avoidance and relief to be funded in 2014/15 from general reserves and built into base budgets for subsequent years

(d) The provisional cash limits as set out in paragraph 11.6 of Annex A, together with the following amendments to savings proposals for 2015/16 :
• The removal of the savings proposal in respect of Children with Disabilities and their carers (estimated at between £2.5M and £3.5M) within Children’s Services (Appendix 7 of Annex A – reference CS12)
• The removal of the savings in Public Transport within Economy,
Transport and Environment totalling up to £1.5M (Appendix 7 of
Annex A – reference 1)
• The removal of the savings in the Library Service within Policy and Resources totalling £0.3M (Appendix 7 of Annex A – reference 1)
• The removal of the £1.5M savings proposal in respect of the Community Safety ACSO service within Policy and Resources (Appendix 7 of Annex A – reference 2)

(e) The capital investment proposals set out in Appendix 13 of Annex A as amended by:
• The addition of £30M split evenly across 2014/15 and 2015/16 as an Investing in Hampshire’s Infrastructure Fund to expedite the repair and renovation of Hampshire’s built highway infrastructure including roads, footways and bridges, funded from a combination of reserves, capital receipts and the initiatives as outlined in paragraph 12.2 of Annex A.

Introduction SPEECH

We have been entreated this morning to use David Price’s good manners and respect.

We can agree with that.

Democracy is the clash of ideas.

There is rarely a simple right or wrong.

We can respect each other’s views. We respect your right to be wrong!

We support transparency too and a request for a recorded vote. So we as for one too on our amendment.

Let’s be clear. We support the Council Tax freeze, delivered by Liberal Democrats in Government.

And we can agree too with the local retention of New Homes Bonus. Far better to be held with local democracy than in quangos like Local Enterprise Partnerships. We support democratic local government.

The last government created massive debt that we are only just starting to pay down.

Good economics suggests that you save in good times, and you invest in bad times – it keeps the economy moving, people in jobs, and reduces benefits. This Coalition government is starting to this now, at least with capital.

But it’s not the approach of this council.

Cuts in revenue, increasingly detached from need, certainly not protecting vulnerable people.
And an unambitious local capital programme, reliant on government grants and developer contribitions.

It need not be like this.

Yes we have to find efficiencies. And the Liberal Democrats would have done so, quite differently.

This council has missed opportunities to do things differently.
– Lost income from Feed in Tariffs through delayed decisions, missing the boat.
– Lost income from property – investing in Tesco in Belfast, but not in Basingstoke
– Lost services through failing on innovation
– Just one example was the Hampshire 500 programme for social housing – last time UI checked it had delivered 5 units not 500. Perhaps the Hampshire 500 was 500 years?

We could have tackled change so much differently –
– Youth services where Hampshire withdrew, filled instead by parish and district councils.
– Libraries where Hampshire cut days, instead having hours extended with volunteers
– We could be opening libraries, not closing them.

So we would not be starting from the place we are in now

We would have saved these and other services many of which – like extended Children’s Centres – have been consigned to history by this Council.

So we don’t start from having made the same cuts, or agreeing the same priorities.

Detail

But we don’t deny the depth of the financial difficulty we are in

We are a party of government, not a party of protest

This Council’s approach to cutting budgets has been an accountant’s approach.

Save 12% in each budget area, regardless of need.

Salami slicing of budgets places the needs of children with disabilities, and their parents in need of respite, as the same priority as the council’s press office.

Salami slicing says a group of rural elderly residents having occasional contact from the mobile library service should have their service cut, instead of finding a different way of delivering the service.

Salami slicing reduces the funding available to repair our roads, rather than investing in our roads so there is less of a need to pay for emergency repairs.

We want to see a different approach to how we budget. We should start that today.

That means our proposal is to slow down, and even stop, cuts in services for the most vulnerable and have a rethink about a different way of making local government work.

We believe five areas stand out for particular protection now.

• Supporting people – where reviewing eligibility criteria simply means leaving vulnerable adults unsupported, increasing the likelihood they will need even more expensive residential care sooner rather than later

• Children with disabilities – where cutting short breaks and respite care, speech and language therapy, and grants, will lead to severly reduced life chances and in many cases family breakdown

• Public transport – where further cuts in many areas will leave unconnected communities: not buses running round empty, which nobody wants, just simply a viable, credible, service

• Libraries – where a different model of service delivery, changes over time, should and could be expanding rather than reducing provision

• and Community Safety – where we would abandon plans to abandon Accredited Community Safety Officers, who give frontline support to many of Hampshire’s communities, preventing rather than solving crime and criminality and helping people be safe in their homes and communities. The Police Commissioner cannot make savings to cover this council’s cuts. Even with his 1.99% tax increase – I note it was not 1.999% – he cannot backfill to cover Hampshire’s Conservative cuts.

Liberal Democrat colleagues will talk to these themes, given the opportunity Chairman, as part of this debate.

That’s not to say that in any of these areas we should not look for genuine efficiencies.

Of course we should. It is for Cabinet and service managers, indeed all staff, to do just that. But these should be genuine savings, not just the quick and dirty option of axing a service, or cutting it regardless of need.

Can we afford these changes? Yes we can.

The proposals here, for 2014/15, simply reduce the £17m that £13m that is proposed to increase the Cost of Change Reserve in 2014/15.

This Reserve currently has £30m in it: papers here suggest this is going to increase to £47m.

Yes, there is a budget pressure for future years, but we would address this through doing things differently.

Because if we want to protect more of what is good about this Council, we need to invest more in doing things differently.

The Council has made a start. But it’s been too slow, and too lacking in ambition.
We want to make a start today on that change.

Investing in Hampshire’s services, and investing in Hampshire’s infrastructure.

Floods

Let’s start with services and let’s start first our one proposal for specific growth – helping tackle the direct effect of climate change in our role as lead Local Flood Authority.

We have all been moved, I’m sure, by the plight of families affected by flooding.

And we have all been moved, just as surely, by the superb effort of our staff and all public services, in responding to the extreme weather of recent weeks.

We’ve had good information, and a speedy response. I was reminded of the Royal Engineers with our instant road building capacity. Thanks to Stuart and his team, and teams out in the districts and from government agencies. The PM is, this morning, making further announcements on national support for families and businesses.

But what if we could have done a little more before the storms? Not always directly doing, but often just enabling.

What if more tree surveys could have identified more vulnerable trees, avoiding more trees coming down with damage and road closures?

What if more work could have been invested in drawing grants from the Environment Agency for flood defences and understanding water courses?

What if more effort could have gone into keeping gullies cleaner and able to flow, improving drainage.

Some of these areas have been the subject of past cuts – salami slicing of services – simple easy cuts, but with long-term costly consequences.

We propose additional spending in this area – just £200,000 would make a big difference to capacity – so that next time, Hampshire is even better prepared, and extreme weather creates less human misery, and less economic impact too.

Investing in Hampshire’s Services

Flooding is a good example of doing things differently.

But we need much bigger change if we are to get our finances into balance, rather than simply salami slicing budgets.

Our approach is for the Council to look at different delivery models for what we do,
to keep business in Hampshire, and to invest directly in services, by doing more ourselves.

Local government is first of all a public service. But it is a public service that increasingly acts in a business-like way.

We have a good record of doing this in many areas: our catering and transport businesses, the way we sell professional services to other councils and to the rest of the public sector.

We could do much, much, more.

Take our highways. This budget proposes reducing revenue spending on highway repairs by giving our private contractor, Amey, more freedom to do what they want when they want, further reducing our ability to influence repairs. So we have not only externalised the service, we won’t even have the opportunity to direct it.

I’m not satisfied now with highway repairs. I’m even less enthusiastic about handing over more control to a contractor that only has the ultimate aim of making more money for shareholders rather than delivering a service.

The success of our catering business is due to internal control, flexibility, and reinvesting profits in the business. That’s how the price of school meals has been held down.

So as the highways contract moves to renewal, let’s work up a way of bringing it back in-house creating our own business, removing the costs of the client-contractor split, reinvesting profits in Hampshire.

If we take this approach with highways, why not too with more Adult Care functions and Children’s Services?

And why not use our legal and financial expertise to find a work around so we can have more say on public transport? We can’t run our own bus business directly, but we can work with partners to create our own public delivery model, ending the scandal of deregistrations that leave communities abandoned, and services that don’t link up with each other let alone with trains.

These are big changes. They are not quick fixes. But they are a route to achieve longer-term savings to protect more services. It’s why we propose investing £1/2m in capacity building now. It’s the only way we stand a chance of protecting what we value most.

I’d hope this approach would appeal to Conservative colleagues. We’re not talking of old style DSOs. We are talking about creating our own businesses, in much the way that some districts have set up housing companies or business centres, and we are looking – I hope – at more active intervention in energy markets.

Investing in Hampshire’s Infrastructure

Our final area of investment is in our built infrastructure where by investing more now, we can save more for the long term. We support allocating New Homes Bonus. But we need to do more, with an extra £30m in a new Hampshire Investment Fund.

We propose accelerating our land disposal programme now that we have returned to a more buoyant housing market. That will directly create jobs, growth and much needed housing, but it will also allow a real and sustained investment in our roads, footways, bridges and more, saving money in the long term and contributing to protecting services.

Conclusion

We have outlined a very different approach to the one from this administration.

It is ambitious to invest in Hampshire’s services, and ambitious to invest in Hampshire’s infrastructure.

There is a different way. One that addresses our need to save by investing rather than cutting.

Investing is the only way forward. The current approach will simply see more cuts brought forward next year, and more the year after. It is not a sustainable way of managing Hampshire.

Where we see ambition from this Council, we’ll support it.

All we ask is that the Administration does this same, and embraces change.

In 2014/15 this moves just £4m into spending instead of into reserves.

Please support this amendment to invest in Hampshire.

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