Dear Editor,
Along with my Green colleagues on the council, I am massively frustrated to see the war of words between the Conservatives and LibDems about council finances again.
Read: Monthly column: Fixing the financial firestorm – A Borough brought back from the brink
Read: Letters: Fixing the financial firestorm – the facts
At a time when councillors of all parties need to pull together to dig the council out of a massive problem, more effort seems to be going into placing the blame than into solving this.
We cannot pull together while hurling abuse at each other.
Yes, part of the problem is that opportunities to increase council tax weren’t always taken in the past. Only one party, the Greens, have consistently argued within the council that protecting services ought to take priority, and thus council tax regretfully did need to be increased every year.
Now we are reaping the consequences of not all opportunities to increase council tax being taken.
It was a decision by the previous LibDem/Labour administration, but in opposition the Conservatives only ever argued that council tax should be lower, and didn’t join us in pointing out the downside of not making council tax increases. That downside is that there isn’t enough money for vital services.
Worse, though, is that the Conservatives continue to try to blame everything on the previous regime.
In doing so, Conservative Mayor Tom Wootton is failing to accept responsibility for his executive’s own errors. Those are errors that have transformed what was a somewhat risky situation in May 2023 into one that is on the verge of catastrophe for Bedford Borough Council and many of its residents who are already struggling for money.
In December 2023, the new Conservative administration used the “peer challenge” to argue the council was in a good financial situation, and had scope to spend more than it was.
They are now trying to rewrite history, and pretend they haven’t made mistakes like reckless capital spending – including buying the Lloyds bank building on the High Street for much more money than it was valued as being worth. Now Bedford Borough has to pay millions of pounds extra in interest payments because of those decisions.
Similarly, at the March meeting of the council’s Budget and Corporate Committee this year I said how “alarmed” I was that a lot of the money owed to the council by property developers was in danger of not being paid, where ‘money at risk’ had risen significantly in the previous year (ie since the Tories came to control the council).
Another key reason for the crisis is that when the Conservative administration set its budget in the spring (which only passed because of the tacit approval of Labour councillors), it included claimed plans for savings that just didn’t stack up. Even now, they are still spending money on things that are not priority areas, like tens of thousands of pounds on town twinning.
I ask all parties to stop this blame game until we have got to the end of this emergency. There will be plenty of them to fight the next mayoral election, but only if they don’t make the council bankrupt in the meantime.
Ben Foley
Convenor of the Green group of councillors, Bedford Council
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