North/South divide: Liverpool cuts 1,500 jobs, while Windsor cuts council tax by 0.5%
Today's news that 1,500 jobs will be cut at the city council is just the start of the bad news.
Over the next few days and weeks more detail will trickle out on the detail of these painful cuts.
Council leader Joe Anderson says it not actually about cuts. Now it is about prioritising what to keep. The effect will be profound.
Council officials often talk about a fictional character called Annie in Anfield when judging the impact of decisions.
Annie may see her library and leisure centre closed. If a carer helps her with her shopping she may lose that. She faces paying more for services. In all Annie's quality of life will be hit on many levels.
Contrast that with news from the Royal Borough of Windsor and Maidenhead in Berkshire.
So wealthy is this local authority that it is cutting council tax by 0.5%, after having cut council tax by 4% last year.
On the government's 'spending power' measure of the cuts, Windsor and Maidenhead lost 1.06% of funding while Liverpool lost 8.9%.
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David Bartlett
City editor of the Post and Echo covering politics, regeneration, and urban affairs.
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There should be no job cuts until the leader of the council makes clear their intentions on dealing with the issue of the Liverpool Direct Contract. We are already told that we are being overcharged by £10 million per year due to the opaque accounting, That should be backdated and recovered. There is about £50 million of the required savings. That would reduce the annual contract price to £60 rather than £70 Million. Then there should be a decision made on the value for money aspect, how much time LDL staff spend on external work for which LCC does not receive a penny and a return on the money we should have received as a supposed joint venture partner since they were created. Then we should re-cover the cost of the IT equipment that has been charged to the city at 3 times the gigh street price with an additional £2000 annual service charge on each PC or laptop. Then we should look at any savings to be made by answering our own damn telephone calls with direct lines to the people who can actually assist you. A 24 hour telephone IT access service at £70 million a year is a luxury we cannot afford. And if there is any question of cutting services then it is one we will not need. So before any individual is made redundant I suggest the city council stop being cowards or hiding the facts and deliberatly delaying the investigations that they first sort this substantial part of the required savings being handed to an organisation that is not and can never be value for money.
LDL sorted openly before a single job is cut!
FOTP is absolutely right. What a pity there's no recommend facility on these comments as I think this would be inundated. I wish he or she wasn't formerly. If the issue now is to prioritise what to keep, then the LDL contract in its current form shouldnât even make the list, but itâs actually the elephant in the room.
David did raise the issue of the non-report on LDL to a Council scrutiny committee a couple of weeks ago - at the time, no-one responded, probably feeling as discouraged and generally battered by the current situation as I have been. And maybe also hoping that somewhere progress was being made. It surely is a priority.
But it raised an important point. There is hardly any information about the meetings of scrutiny committees on the council website - no meeting dates, no documents, no minutes? Have they actually been meeting - and if they haven't, why not?
We were told in October who the negotiations had been assigned to, but not only do we not know what progress, if any, they have made, there was no detail about how long they had to get something done.
I suspect they will drag it on until renewal is automatic - most service contracts have renewal clauses which require the party that wants to cancel etc. to give several months' notice before the renewal date, otherwise the whole thing rolls over. So if everyone procrastinates long enough, it really will be too late, or too expensive.
So what are the time scales?
Sorting this out is good governance - and good politics - how can they possibly be sending doom and gloom emails around the council, slashing budgets for vital services, and do nothing about LDL. I suspect the Council think that the anger and outrage people feel about the cuts has distracted them. We need to show them that this is a miscalculation. Anderson needs to show that the tail (McElhinney and LDL) is no longer wagging the Council dog - which I doubt. Playing politics by joining marches against cuts and flashing trade-unionist credentials will not cut it when you're doing nothing whatsoever about waste on this scale.