In our manifesto for the 2003 elections we said: ”The Liberal Democrats believe in fairness for all. That means delivering the services people need at a cost that is fair to the tax payer and a work load that is fair to our staff.” We went on to promise to keep any rises in council tax in line with inflation, so we support the plan to keep tax rise to 2.5% in the budget. We would have done the same and it has been very easy to do this because the rise in government support has been better in the last two years than any other time in the memory of the County Treasurer. This year’s rise in government support was 3%, well above inflation.
Where we differ from the Conservatives is in our greater support for Community Development. This means supporting local initiatives because local initiatives are guaranteed to be focussed on real needs and to be supported by the local community. That, in turn, means that money spent on local initiatives goes further because of local effort. So we support the Community Initiatives Fund suggested by the previous Chief Executive and, in our manifesto, we promised to fund this with at least £200,000 per year. The budget gives only £100,000 so we would put more in.
Where would we find it? Well there are at least three other contingency reserves to equalise the impact of interest rates, government support and planning grant, not to mention a reserve to pay for housing benefit software which has been installed already. We would have a review of these reserves and the under spend at the end of this financial year when we would expect to demonstrate funds available of well over £100,000 which will come from next year’s tax payers on and should be spent on next years Community Initiatives, instead of storing the money for future years when we already have sufficient contingency funds.
Elizabeth Cartwright said, in the budget debate, that no grant from the community initiatives fund had been refused from lack of funds but we would claim that the grants had been reduced to make the funds go further and that reduces support to the community.
In view of this, the Liberal Democrats abstained to indicate their regret that the community Initiatives Fund was inadequately supported.