FIDDLING WHILE CARDIFF BURNS
PUBLIC money must have been invested in all the wrong ways in all the wrong places if the state of our councils is anything to go by. Just what have they done with all our money?
Look at this story in the South Wales Argus about Caerphilly Council.
I picked up a report from Cardiff Central Library this weekend called “Tell us your views on the Council’s budget proposals” asking Cardiffians in a closed questionnaire to decide, for instance, whether increasing the charge to its four bowling clubs for maintenance of greens should rise by £1,000, £1,000 to £2,000, £2,000 or not at all. This is fiddling while Rome burns with bizarre options.
Why are we electing councillors if we are asking the public to decide on piffling matters?
Restricting council tax payers to closed questionnaires which, frankly, insult their intelligence is the first mistake. Printing stupid forms and doing so in two different languages is costly (when everyone knows that less than five per cent are answered in Welsh). So why do it unless they are forced to by archaic rules?
The council would need to be far, far more open, straightforward and honest about its own finances for us council tax payers to make anything like a meaningful contribution in budget strategies and forward planning.
Council leader Huw Thomas spouts the usual diarrhea in the introduction about being committed to making Cardiff a “stronger, fairer and greener city” despite having faced “a decade of austerity” (what is his alternative, prey tell, to austerity?), the “Cost-of-living crisis” (this is a manufactured mirage because it is always a crisis), COVID-19 and closing a budget gap of more than £350 million since 2010 (they obviously got the budget wrong and were living in fantasy land).
Using “austerity” to describe our period in history – when most people get meals delivered to their doorsteps at all hours on credit and our shops are brimming with food – is entirely bogus and deceiving. What would our ancestors who were jailed for stealing rabbits from His Lordship’s estate in the 1800s make of that? As for “cost-of-living crisis”, again even a basic comparison with times gone by would render that foul politically engineered calumny just as bogus and deceiving.
“We estimate that, because of a combination of rising costs and demand on services, just maintaining the services the city currently benefits from will cost an extra £56 million next year,” he writes before explaining the budget challenge and explaining how they intend to close the gap.
A, COUNCIL TAX will go up but this only accounts for 26 per cent of the council’s budget so will not be enough.
B, USE OF RESERVES. “The council has to be very careful when using its financial reserves; there is only a limited amount available and once they’re gone they’re gone,” he writes.
C, CHANGES OR REDUCTIONS TO SERVICES.
D, EFFICIENCY SAVINGS. He states that the council is committed to protecting frontline services so is looking to make services through “back-office efficiencies”.
Let’s take them one-by-one.
A, Not enough people are paying COUNCIL TAX because the system much too generously eliminates from responsibility for paying (yet still gives them a vote) far, far too many people (particularly in Cardiff with its high student population). We now need to target those who make no contribution (I fear that this number is growing exponentially) and come to some arrangement in a far more flexible and person-centred system with collectors incentivised to bring in more revenue with commission and bonuses.
Make the collecting of Council Tax a much, much more proactive, hands-on and involved community businesses exactly in the way our charities do with street collections so it is seen as a voluntary act of giving rather than an involuntary duty with penalties for non-payment. Councils should crowdfund for individual projects. This would act as as very useful way of measuring public opinion and act as a massive aid to democracy.
This philosophy should extend to to individual councillors and officers, too, on high salaries in that members of the public could pay them what they think they are worth. Let them present to the public on crowdfunding pages their usefulness and their individual record for us to judge rather than have the councillors eternally retain their seats on the votes of a tiny and getting tinier sliver of the population in, frankly, dubious elections and the officers lie back and luxuriate on protected terms for life under crippling ancient sinecure-retaining arrangements.
Rather than setting salaries, pensions, terms and conditions and numerous other arrangements according to old established rules in a protection racket, let the public decide, once they’ve been given the full picture.
B, Reserves in this context I take to mean invested stocks and shares and other assets which should be multiplying massively as markets boom and prosper. Now here lies the rub. Are these being managed properly? Cardiff University’s Wales Fiscal Analysis unit (Plaid’s bean counting division) constantly tell us about shortfalls from England to Wales being the cause of our woes in isolation as if it is A, Not possible for us to generate our own wealth and B, Not possible to prosper by investing in the right markets at exactly the right times. These reserves are, essentially, savings for a rainy day. How are rainy days defined and how are these actually being saved?
C, The biggest component by far in Cardiff Council’s efficiency savings will come from CHANGES OR REDUCTIONS TO SERVICES. Hence the questionnaire asking you to help to decide what should be cut where and by how much. Massive waste is entirely normal and, actually, traditionally celebrated and reinforced in the culture itself with its endless pomp and circumstance and furious folly. Councils and their staff need to first acknowledge that and open up to new directions and new attitudes which those in the private sector have already developed. Some services are not needed anyway while others are there for the staff mainly and not for the paying public. Wales, more than any country possibly in the world, designs its public services for the benefit of the people who work in them rather than the people who use them (look at our buses running when the drivers want to run them rather than when we want to use them). The concept of service itself needs to be completely re-assessed and completely re-thought so that they actually do work for us and not for themselves. This would be a complete revolution.
D Inefficiency, too, is normal and built into the public sector in Wales. It, in fact, thrives on both. EFFICIENCY SAVINGS, therefore, in this context sounds like a contradiction in terms.
This has to be concentrated on salaries and artificial, protection racketeering terms and conditions running rampant in city hall.
MY SUGGESTIONS
- ESTABLISH HOW MUCH WAS LOST AND TO WHOM IN FRAUDULENT CLAIMS DURING COVID-19 AND GET THAT MONEY BACK.
- CUT THE NUMBER OF COUNCILLORS AND CUT THEIR SALARIES.
- DROP THE BILINGUAL POLICY TO SAVE NEEDLESS EXTRAVAGANT WASTE.
- MAKE ALL OFFICERS AND COUNCILLORS MORE DIRECTLY ACCOUNTABLE TO THE PEOPLE WHO PAY THEM BY ASKING THE PUBLIC TO PAY THEM WHAT THEY THINK THEY ARE WORTH.
- HAVE ALL OFFICERS RE-APPLY FOIR THEIR OWN JOBS AND ASK EACH INDIVIDUALLY TO SUGGEST SAVINGS.
GARRY W GIBBS 