An Alternative to The Council Budget

Reading Evening Post today about how our neighbours over at Neath & Port Talbot have managed to balance the books for next years budget.

They are in the shit too, but to the tune of £7m as opposed to the £17m Swansea is in.

The Swansea council plan has been to close the Tennis Centre, make cuts to education, switch off street lights and council job losses. Hardly an innovative method of cutting costs, just seemingly as though an accountant has looked at the budget sheet and attacked it with a red pen, crossing out the stuff he deems unneccessary and slashing spending on key areas he thinks are over-spent.

Residents in Neath-Port Talbot are unhappy too with proposed council tax increases and cuts to services, but reading what is proposed I certainly do think that those of us west of the Afon Nedd do seem to be harder hit. At least the Director of Finance over there has attempted to be innovative with their budget savings with schemes such as:

• Federated school districts that group schools in an area together and manage them under a single board.
• Looking for a private partner to manage the street lamps - they can pay for energy efficient bulbs which the council cannot afford to. This would mean no street lights being turned off.
• 750 job cuts are planned, but there is a churn of 400 jobs annually, so a lot can be done through not filling vacancies rather than redundancies.

It's just a shame that Swansea Council lack the ability and experience to come up with something innovative, rather than the slash and raid mentality they've had for the last few years.