Coun Paul Bellenger: Yet another difficult council budget

Coun Paul Bellenger writes: Difficult decisions are made as to where money will be spent, where it needs to be saved, what services may have to be cut and what jobs may go. All of these have an impact somewhere within our borough and on the people who live within it.

For many years government has made cuts to the funding which goes to each authority throughout the country. Calderdale Council has seen approximately £150million cut from its budget over recent years.

This has a huge knock-on effect to how the borough is managed and maintained which usually sees our parks and green spaces suffer the most as these are non-statutory services, unlike our adult and children’s services.

Adult and children’s services take roughly 71 per cent of the authority’s budget every year, leaving just 29 per cent to cover everything else: everything from highways and engineering, environmental services, community safety and support, green space and street scene, and housing services – the list goes on.

It makes it difficult to provide a consistent level of service when there is less money coming in to run them and yet cuts still have to be made from these services.

We have seen only this past year where our winter maintenance service nearly took a hit in its budget. The proposal to cut the service was put forward by the Labour administration and was one that could have quite easily had a detrimental impact on the safety of our road network. Fortunately, the decision was overturned, but it does show how difficult it is to make those savings without them having an impact on our communities.

Our adult health and children’s services cost so much to provide due to their complexities and that there would be a much greater impact on the people within our communities if they were to be cut.

As a Liberal Democrat and someone with a business background, I would rather look at ways in which an authority could generate income rather than make cuts. I have always been an avid fan of commercialisation and looking at ways in which an authority could generate income from providing different services to external bodies or neighbouring authorities.

Doing this not only generates income but provides employment, it may not always be sustainable but then what is these days?

Everything is about risk management. Being commercially minded comes with risks, however Alan Sugar, Donald Trump, Richard Branson, and other wealthy business tycoons didn’t get to where they are today without taking risks.

Authorities need to look at doing the same if they want to reduce those deficits and create some security within all services and not just the two that take the 71 per cent.

Every year it’s the same old thing and every year each political party takes a political stance as we all want our own budget ideas to be taken on board and put into practice.

We also hope that the year ahead doesn’t throw any curved balls our way as it only takes something like a severe storm, a pandemic, a road collapse, or something else unexpected to suddenly throw us into a financial crisis.