Dear Councillors,
Your letter to parish and town councils and the response from the leader of
Cornwall council raise
some profound issues which I think will resonate with many people.
1. You are, of course, perfectly at liberty to take soundings from your
fellow Parish Councils on your views and this is a sensible approach.
I see no reason for a divide and rule strategy
so that you are only at liberty to speak to Cornwall Council directly or
through your own Cornwall Councillor.
2. I think that Cornwall Council would be trusted more if it was more careful
with the numbers it uses. Trust between us all is very important,
particularly to Cornwall Council, which is heavily reliant on your role as the
real volunteers.
I am sure Cllr
Pollard knows this, as he has been a town councillor for many years.
3. A little bit of clarity
- the reduction from 22,000 to 12,000 is totally irrelevant because it largely
relates to schools staff who are no longer employed by the Council because
their schools have become academies. No efficiencies by the Council there.
- 6,100 is also pretty irrelevant
because many staff have been transferred to separate companies which are
largely still owned or paid for by the Council. For example, Cornwall
Housing and Cormac are separate companies but they are still part of the
Council.
- I would say that, as of last year, the head count had reduced by about
1000 (as against a total number of employees excluding schools staff of about 10,000). The Council should publish the real numbers.
- If you compare the net cumulative budget of the seven predecessor
councils in their final year with the budget for this year of Cornwall Council
it has reduced from £549.945m to £505.005m. So about 8 per cent in cash
terms. Of course, in the meantime there has been inflation and other
pressures. But not many people in
Cornwall
have been able to increase their expenditure by the rate of inflation through
the recession.
- It is surely right for the Council to tighten its belt when council tax
is one of the largest bills for working families.
- Cornwall Council often complains that it is unfairly funded by central
Government. I think there are issues here that deserve closer examination but
the Council uses figures for rural councils as a group compared to urban
councils. If you look at
Cornwall's
own funding we are almost in the middle when compared with all other unitary
councils, urban or rural.
- I think
Cornwall
Council have reduced their spend on interim staff but some of that is
undoubtedly due to the completion of large projects. It is difficult to
unpick this as some of these staff will have become permanent staff and others
have just reached the end of the project they were working on (like the BT deal
or the new accounts system). On the other hand the spend on adult social
care has ballooned by £7m due to poor management.
- Bear in mind that Cornwall Council are building themselves new offices
for £15m (allegedly to save money but with no published business plan) and
preserving others so that Cormac can have a “professional HQ” .
- on planning, I have stood up for the west side of
Truro. I remain extremely concerned
about the western approach to
Truro
and traffic in Highertown. I do believe that members took their eye off
the ball because of the promise of a stadium, which has not materialised and
the former CEO was in the thick of that, as he made clear at the time.
- it is also clearly wrong to try and suggest that a planning application for
1500 dwellings and a supermarket should be counted as one application on a par
with one application for a small extension to a domestic dwelling. That
is a gross distortion of statistics and does not represent a true and accurate
picture.
I hope that my own views do in some manner reflect and support your own.
You are saying no more than I have heard elsewhere throughout
Cornwall and you reflect a deep concern
that the gap between Cornwall Council and town and parish councils is, in
general, getting wider not narrower.
Fiona Ferguson
Cornwall Councillor Truro Trehaverne