ON Monday, Hampshire Count Council’s Cabinet will meet  to discuss the Revenue Savings Proposals, which will inform the next County Council budget.

 

Recently, the Leader of the County Council, Nick Adams-King, wrote an article in this newspaper explaining that the Council was not “going bust”, despite the fact that the Council’s deficit has risen from over £132million to over £170m million in recent months.

I have much sympathy for his task, as local government has been starved of funding by his political party for 14 years and there is no sign that the situation is going to improve under the new government.

Unfortunately, the article did not explain the depths of cuts or how they will impact local residents. So,  allow me to fill in the gaps and outline what will happen if the proposed cuts are agreed.

If you think that our local roads couldn’t get any worse, then think again. The proposal to Cabinet is that planned maintenance activity is reduced by £7.5 million from April. And yes, I do hear the cynics saying that they hadn’t realised there was any maintenance!

So, just to add a bit of icing to the cake. The budget for Highways Winter Services is set to reduce by £1 million.

If you were planning to travel by bus to save your car tyres then think again because cuts to Passenger Transport of the magnitude of £587,000 are being planned.

But if you decide to drive to a rural countryside car park you will now be charged to park. But please don’t travel in the evening because the road lights are going to be dimmed and the hours they are lit are going to be shortened yet again.

As we all saw last week there are plans to close our local recycling centre so you will have to travel further on our wrecked roads to try and recycle your rubbish.

A number of grants are being cut including to the Hampshire Cultural Trust, for homelessness support services and to a number of adult social care grant schemes. There are also plans to effectively increase adult social care charges and make some reductions to library stock.

These proposals are not new as they have all been consulted upon. For many of the proposals the majority of the public disagreed but they are still recommended for Cabinet approval. The Council’s own scrutiny committees have also asked the Cabinet to think again on some of the proposals.

In addition to savings, local councils have a duty to ensure that their proposals do not have an adverse impact on people with protected characteristics. Sadly, only one proposal is regarded as neutral (library stock) and of the remainder, over half have been assessed as having medium or high negative impact. The most frequent combinations of impacts involve age, disability, gender, poverty, rurality and race. By my reckoning that is probably well over half of the local population.

It's grim and life isn’t going to get easier any time soon but there is one huge elephant in the room which needs dealing with before things can begin to get better and that is the huge, and rising cost of adult social care. As Cllr Adams-King said, if people need help we have a duty to provide it. Unfortunately help is not always provided in a timely fashion so this means that patients are not able to leave hospital as soon as they are medically fit, which puts pressure on our overstretched health service.

I’m unhappy about the cuts, some of which seem shortsighted, because they will have an adverse effect on many people but I am angry about the fact that national government has ducked the problem of social care and has underfunded local government to such an extent that these cuts are necessary. In the mean time, local people have to pay the price.

Sandra Gidley,

Test Valley borough councillor

 

 

 

 

 

 

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