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Labour fails Medway residents

By on Friday 26th October 2007 17:27 / 1 comment

 

If you, like me, are wondering why the Council has begun a campaign for a fairer funding deal, then Princes Park Conservatives have given us the answer.

On their blog – an excellent resource for residents of Princes Park – they have exposed the £60 million difference in funding between Medway and Nottingham.

Yes, the Labour Government has officially failed residents of Medway in their allocation of government money – Medway Council gets £284 per resident, whilst Peterborugh gets £405 per resident and Walsall gets £465 per resident, nearly twice as much as Medway!

Labour members on Medway Council have rushed to the defence of their government, claiming that it is because there is no deprivation in Medway (a wild hypothesis countered on this blog by Cllr John Ward). I, for one, disagree, and see no reason for residents of Medway (and services such as leisure facilities) to suffer because the government is inept.

 

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1 Comment

  1. Cllr John Ward says:
    Saturday 27th October 2007 at 06:07

    I have for some time been talking about the tens of millions of pounds per year that is effectively being stolen from Medway. It is good that, at last, the fully-verified figures have been released into the public domain to show just how big a gap there is between us and other Authorities.

    At meetings where I have brought this up, Labour members have heckled me and behaved extremely poorly — to the extent that the independent Standards Committee members have hauled in the Party Group leaders to make it clear how all councillors are expected to behave.

    Of course, the reality in this specific case is that Labour cannot afford to have the “wrong” (i.e. true) story be made public, especially in front of their (faltering) core voters, as I was doing on one such occasion several weeks ago.

    The funding situation in Medway is even worse than the basic deliberate underfunding. There is an extra £4.5 million taken away every year now: this is the second year of so-called “floor damping” and it will apparently continue indefinitely.

    It is like taking your Cadets out to lunch, but finding you don’t have enough money for everything. Say you had twenty cadets and were £10 short. What would you do?

    Well, I’d take a little off each bill (perhaps no cup of tea or coffee after the meal, as that could be made back at your base). The government’s method would be to pick on someone in the group whom they do not like and take it all away from him. So he gets only half a meal at best.

    Thus it is with Medway. We get just a burger, whereas everyone else also gets fries and a dessert — oh, and a cup of tea!

    This despicable practice should be made illegal. Indeed, although there are legitimate reasons for fine tuning of grant levels to Local Authorities, this kind of wholesale gerrymandering is completely inexcusable.

    Thinking back to my “If I ruled the world” item here a while back, I’d have any Chancellor or other Minister responsible for such fiddling debarred from holding public office for life, automatically and with no possibility of this being changed.

    That would be a disincentive, and various communities in the country would benefit. The only ones who would lose would be the inefficient and wasteful Labour councils that the money we should be getting is propping up — conveniently (for Labour) sweeping it all under the carpet.

    Well, it’s about time the people of Medway let their (Labour!) MPs know that they won’t stand for it any longer. They should make it clear that they won’t be voting Labour at the next General Election unless full restoration of all our missing funding is made without delay, and guaranteed in future years.

    Someone needs to start a campaign going…

 
 

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