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By Councillor John Ward
It’s official — from Medway’s Labour Group. There is no deprivation in Medway, and that of course includes Twydall. Well, that’s news to me!
It was at last Thursday’s meeting of the full Medway Council that this year’s budget situation was raised, and official figures quoted showing how Medway received so much less per head of population than other areas of the country (which is how Government funding of Local Authorities is decided — the infamous “Barnett Formula”) that we are tens of millions of pounds underfunded every year.
Figures quoted from official Government sources showed that, if Medway were dealt with on the same basis as these other (generally northern Labour) councils, it would make a difference of up to £60 million more coming here every year.
As I said at the Council meeting: I hadn’t realised just how vast the gap was, and it was no wonder that we were now struggling so hard against these more-or-less impossible odds.
However, the Labour finance spokesman, Twydall’s Cllr Glyn Griffiths, claimed that the difference was down to Medway not having any deprived areas: there is a part of this funding formula that gives extra funding to such areas, and we aren’t getting any of that because we don’t need it, as we are a prosperous area.
Really? I say to him: tell that to residents in your own ward of Twydall, Councillor Griffiths! They aren’t in need of any extra support, then? Not according to you!
It is little wonder that, with attitudes like this, most Medway residents no longer really want any Labour representation on the Council. Interestingly, there are signs of this dissatisfaction with Labour brewing in the few remaining wards where still they have councillors, including Twydall.
Now that the three Rainham wards nearby now have only Conservative Councillors, how long can it be before Twydall goes the same way as Rainham, Strood and other parts of Medway that have voted Labour councillors out of office? Okay, Strood tends to keep one token Labour member somewhere in the urban part, but I expect even that to end at the next local elections.
If the Labour Group continue to so misrepresent and sell short the people in their own and other wards, this “Incredible Shrinking Party” (to borrow a movie title!) will simply wipe itself out, as it has been doing for the last ten years.
The Labour presence on Medway Council has gone down at every election since the Unitary’s creation (and even between elections) from 39 members in 1997 to 25 in 2000, 17 in 2003, 16 when Cllr Chishti crossed the floor to our side, and earlier this year the number reduced still further to just 13 members.
Unless local Labour members buck up their ideas in very short order, and for starters at least join us in fighting the dishonest funding regime that deprives Medway of huge amounts of funding, they will be perceived even more than they already are as out of touch and merely tame “pawns” of their national Party.
That is no use whatsoever to the communities of Medway — and if they don’t change their ways even more of them will be thrown out of office in three years or so from now, perhaps even all of them. They’ll then have only themselves to blame.
Councillor Ward is one of the 3 Councillors for Rochester South & Horsted Ward on Medway Council – you can view his website here.
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It is a sad fact, but Twydall is like most wards in the Country in that it is mixed: part of Twydall is prospering wonderfully, whereas part of Twydall is indeed in need of more funding and greater support from those in authority.
It is not merely enough for a Councillor (who doesn’t live in the ward, by the way) to speak up for just part of his ward; he needs to take his head from the clouds, land firmly on the ground (with both feet) and realise that there are parts right accross Medway that are deprived, and that some of those areas are within Twydall.
Incidentally, this follows on nicely from the great Yourmedway debate, in which Cllr Griffiths himelf admitted that not everything was “rosy in the garden”!
Where is the continuity in that when compared with the above article?
Another sad fact is that Labour councillors depend on deprivation for much of their core vote. Therefore there is no incentive for them to do anything about changing that situation.
They will have seen their vote collapse in areas that have come out of deprivation, even partially, so have a vested interest in maintaining things as they are.
Of course, if they truly cared more about their community than their own personal and party’s standing, then this would not be the overriding consideration that it has been shown to be.
The same applies to the myth of what the Labour Government (and its fellows in local gov’t) means by the term “affordable housing”. This means housing subsidised by everyone else to enable more (usually Unionised) public-sector workers into an area, in order to shift the political balance in favour of Labour.
It is not intended to apply to other categories of house-buyers, who might be seen by the ordinary person as just as much “key workers” as those defined by central government.
The figures are also fiddled when the scheme is presented, and you might find this Jottings item of mine interesting in this respect.
Agree with Cllr Ward- very good points made.
I state this having had experience within financial aspects of ‘housing associations’- the purpose, aims and objectives are all way of the radar and need to be readdressed very quickly if you ask me.
Perhaps I should point out here that when Cllr Ward emailed me this article, he made clear that he was re-using one he had written for the Strood Conservatives Forum.
Check it out here
Interestingly, over at Strood, one of our Councillors is very knowledgeable about this whole subject area, I recently discovered.
It might be worth Martinez signing-up over there and starting a discussion on this topic, or perhaps establish contact privately with the aim of sharing ideas and perhaps getting changes to the system. For the latter, the easiest way is probably via the council’s website, where Cllr Avey’s page of contact info is HERE.
Here’s something of interest on this topic:
The current tranche of Government-driven Post Office closures “could further lead to the lack of services in some of the most disadvantaged wards in England.”
This is quoted directly from an officer’s report to the Community Services Scrutiny Committee who will be be looking at this topic tomorrow evening (Tuesday): see paragraph 4.3 in the report to agenda item 5B.
Interestingly, this item has been called for by Labour councillor Mrs Teresa Murray, who is (among other things) aiming to be the Labour candidate for Rochester and Strood parliamentary constituency. All her Council activities up to now have been aimed and furthering her own ambitions, supporting without question everything that the Labour Government is doing, and using every opportunity to try to run down everything that the Conservative Administration of Medway Council has done.
I sense an “own goal” here! Who is it attempting to deprive these disadvantaged areas of a vital facility? Is it us? No! It is the Labour Government and no-one else in the entire universe!
Oops…
I shall be there myself, but not necessarily on the committee (my ward colleague cannot be there, but another of our Group had already been approached to substitute for her) — if not, I shall be there as the ward member in connection with the Stirling Centre (agenda item 5A), for which a workable way forward has now been proposed, based mainly on the public’s response to our consultation.
On the Stirling Centre issue, a known long-term Labour aupporter has been putting out negative commen ts about my involvement and that of my ward colleagues. Apparently unnoticed by him, despite my being very open and visible about this, I made extensive notes on my Acorn PocketBook palmtop computer at the two public meetings (I attended both) which were used to help achieve this result.
Once again, this just goes to show who it is who merely makes party politically-driven noise, and who actually achieves worthwhile results.
Thus we can perhaps now clearly see that in all three of these subjects — deprivation, Post Office closures and the Stirling Centre, all of which have been recently covered on this website — the problem is (one way or another) universally the Labour Government, and the solution can be found only in the on-the-ground efforts by local Conservative Councillors.
Certainly the rather obvious posturing by Labour members with their own personal and party agendas achieves nothing for our residents, however craftily it is dressed up to look that way.
It is a useful object lesson for political students to come and listen to these individuals strutting their stuff: it is all very plausible until you take a step back and start to think about what is really going on. The expression “Hey! Hang on a minute!” springs to my mind here…
An additional snippet of information: Medway has no fewer than 29 neighbourhoods that fall into the worst-off 25% in the country.
This is according to the Government’s own data from the Multiple Index of Deprivation, and is mentioned in (what is currently the consultation draft version of) Medway’s Social Regeneration Strategy on page 6 at paragraph 2.4, under “Strategic Priority One”.
I now have further official facts and figures, this time from CIPFA, no less!
The funding gap is even greater than we previously thought — we clearly did not know Leicester City’s grant when we held our Press Conference a few weeks ago. They receive £546.12 per head of population, whereas Medway receives just £283.88 — i.e. we get barely half as much per capita. If we were to be funded on the same basis as Leicester, we’d have an additional £65,849,000 Formula Grant per year! Not that we need that much: a third of that amount would suffice, saving taxpayer’s money (as we in Medway tend to do very strongly, as our Independent Auditors agree).
Indeed, councils such as ours are effectively subsidising inefficient Labour-run councils to a degree that means they receive a far higher share (in those regions) of GDP than any other EU or OECD country, as follows (taken from another official source, and published in “The Times” fairly recently):
70.5% (Northern Ireland)
64.3% (Wales)
63.0% (North East)
55.6% (Scotland)
54.0% (North West)
By contrast we in the South East get just 32% of GDP — well below even the national average of 44.1%, let alone how far it is below the north and Scotland etc. Even the East Region gets more than 38%, and the South West over 42%.
Incidentally, note that these headline figures do not in themselves show the “hidden” five-to-one per capita ratio that is embedded in the detail (i.e. for certain parts of the grant), but at the council offices our Finance Chiefs are well aware of all this — they haven’t been fooled!
Thus, not only the Medway-specific extreme case, but the regional disparities, all become clear. We can with absolute certainty lay the blame for Medway’s extremely difficult situation entirely at the Government’s door.
There is no other cause behind the budget problems we are experiencing and will continue to experience all the while this corrupt funding system (at the Government end — there is little if anything wrong with our end of the current system!)remains in place.