Bugeting, Penny Pinching and Generosity

Last night we had the Council’s budget meeting to set the budget and Council Tax for the coming year.
First item of business was to elect a new Chairman for the rest of the Council year following the handing of the poison chalice of the Planning brief to John Kirby. Council was unanimous in supporting Margaret Sheldrick as our Chair. I have to say that she made a pretty decent fist of her first meeting and at least seems to have a basic grasp of Standing Orders and the Rules of Debate!
So it was on the main business of the evening, in a previous post I referred to the political bile that spewed forth from the Leader and in an attempt to get some facts out into the public domain I asked Martin Wise the following question:-
‘In addition to the Formula Grant I understand that the Council receives a number of other funding streams. Please can you tell me how much the Council will receive by way of specific grants (including miscellaneous revenue grants) and area based grants in 2009/10 and how much capital grant funding the Council has been allocated for next year.’

The Formula Grant is what used to be called the Rate Support Grant and the Council gets its revenue funding from 3 main sources:-
Government Grant £17.7M
Fees and Charges £7.57M
Council Tax £9.52M
The Council also gets a lot of other money from Government by way of extra grants, I won’t bore you with a list but suffice to say that in total over an extra 7 million will be pumped into Thanet via the Council this year. If you add to that the many millions spent on upgrading and improving our school buildings and facilities, our health care services by way of new Health Centre’s, improvements to our Hospital and extra Doctors and Nurses, the planned extension to the East Kent Access plus the money paid to third sector organizations you will see that far from neglecting Thanet, Government has recognized our unique and special problems and has provided much funding to address them. Of course much more needs to be done and local Labour Councillors will continue to press for extra help.
Martin Wise was a bit sheepish about the extra money and listed a few of the smaller amounts received but the inescapable fact is that he was a bit embarrassed about it.
The debate then moved on to the Budget itself and an amendment was moved to remove the £10 charge being imposed on disabled peoples carers to get a bus pass to accompany disabled people on the bus. This charge is estimated to raise £1000.00 in a year, yes just a thousand pounds which in overall terms on a budget of over £34 million is a drop in the ocean. Prior notice was given of this amendment and in private conversations with some Tories they were very supportive of this move but on the night it was voted through with 100% support on the Tory benches. I suspect and hope that this mean and penny pinching move will come back to bite them.
To rub salt in the wound we were also discussing the Scheme of Members Allowances, although it was agreed not to increase the basic allowances and Special Responsibility Allowances overall several additional payments were agreed. It seems that Cabinet Members are to get two ‘Lead Members’ each and these people are to be paid £500 a year each, also agreed was the setting up of a General Purposes Committee.
This Committee may or may not meet in the course of a year according to the Officers report but notwithstanding this it was agreed that the Chairman of a Committee that may not meet will receive £1216 a year and the Vice Chairman £279 a year.

So to sum up the Tories agreed that an extra £6495 a year should be included in the Budget and paid to an additional 12 of their Members but £1000 should not be removed from the Budget to help people who care for disabled people.
Incidentally this means that 29 out of 34 Tories now receive an extra sum of money on top of their basic allowance! No doubt in the coming months they will find a way to rectify this situation.