First phase of Peterborough City Council’s controversial budget passed in stormy debate

At last night’s (December 8) meeting, members of the Full Council heard from Cllr Andy Coles, Cabinet Member for Finance at their meeting (08 December), that passing the first stage of the budget was vital if the council is to retain financial control.

Cllr Coles said: “We have a difficult mountain to climb in terms of saving money, but thankfully we’ve got this part through tonight and I’m very grateful for that.”

The first stage was approved with 30 members voting ‘for’ the budget, but critically 27 members elected to abstain from voting, which could have put that approval at risk.

Cllr Coles added: “I was a little disappointed that opposition members felt the need to abstain rather than approve the budget, especially as we’ve worked so hard together over the past few months.”

Prior to the vote, opposition members had voiced a series of criticisms aimed at the leading Conservative group and their handling of the financial purse strings.

These included the accusation from Leader of the LibDems Group, Cllr Nick Sandford, that despite the difficulties being faced through COVID, the “…flogging-off ever more of the family silver each year to pay the electric bill” was not a sustainable strategy.

Cllr Sandford, in justifying the LibDems reason for abstaining, added: “This administration has made a lot of mistakes over the 20 years that it has been running this council, but central government must also take their share of the blame.

“When our Leader meets with top government officials like Rishi Sunak, I wish he’d spend a bit less time on ‘soundbites’ and ‘photo opportunities’, and actually start taking the government to task for the way they’ve helped cripple Peterborough’s finances over a ten-year period by swingeing cuts in the grant that we receive.

“They’ve caused part of the problem, yet they threaten to come in and take us over if we don’t sort out the mess that they are at least partly responsible for.

“Our Capital spending program has rightly come under scrutiny however, and applying 1980s transport solutions ie, more road building to solve 21st Century transport problems in one of the fastest growing cities in the country, is just one of this administration’s answers that just doesn’t work.”

Cllr Shaz Nawaz, Leader of the Labour Group, said: “Part of the reason we find ourselves in this huge problem that we have today is that this administration has done everything it can to keep council taxes low, even when other local authorities were raising council tax.

“As a result, we have an extremely difficult mountain to climb and this is a very difficult time that we find ourselves in – so we have to work together.

“I’m not making an attack on every single member of the Conservative Group, but keeping council tax low when we had low reserves was, in my opinion, a mistake which we are now suffering from.

“We keep being told that we have one of the lowest unit-costs of any council in the country – well if that is the case then why are other councils’ who have higher unit-costs than us managing better? Surely the answer is that we must be doing something wrong?

“Every time over the past few years when we’ve had a budget meeting, I’ve said that we need more ‘forward planning’: we need to be looking at year three, four and five – not just the current financial year and the one after that – but I’ve always been ignored.

“Its not that we didn’t know we had a challenge ahead. We knew there were government cuts to our grant for the past 10 or 11 years, and we should’ve had better planning.

“This administration thinks that the sale of assets is the answer to everything; but my problem with that is that it is very short-term thinking: once you’ve sold those assets, you lose income from them – once they’ve gone, they’ve gone, and you can’t get them back.

“What we should be doing instead is thinking of better ways to utilise those assets to generate income; but now that the government has us under the microscope, they’re looking at ways of forcing us to balance the books, including selling off assets.

“Unfortunately, as I see it, we are now in a position where we have no choice but to sell assets because I cannot see any other way of bridging our financial gap.”

Cllr Coles responded by saying: “I understand different political parties have different views on matters, but it seems that they will take any opportunity to criticise central government or the Conservative Party, and this is what has happened.

“They may well want different areas of the budget to be developed – but they have to be in no doubt that these will have to be put in abeyance until 2023/24 when financial sustainability is achieved.”

Leader of the Council, Cllr Wayne Fitzgerald, while pleased that the first stage of the budget has been approved, was equally irked by some of the opposition comments: “Look, we are working together more collaboratively because everybody has the same challenges.

“As for negative and scathing comments, well, they’re the opposition – let’s not forget that we’re in a political arena.

“Their job is to challenge the administration – but I also challenged them back because we have a collective responsibility – there are sixty councillors, not just the 29 Conservatives.

“We alone cannot pass that budget, and the others cannot say that they are not responsible either; so, we need to make sure that we’re all doing this together.”

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