
Every January, Cheltenham Borough Council publishes its budget for the following financial year and asks for comments. This year, if you want to comment, you have to send in your views by 31st January, so you haven’t got a lot of time left. To be brutally frank, I’m not really convinced it’s worth your while since I’ve never known the Council make any changes following the public consultation.
However, if you want to have a go, here are a couple of things you might like to ask about.
You’ve probably heard by now that the Council has closed the Swindon Road re-cycling centre, claiming it’s too expensive to run and requires substantial updating. But you wouldn’t know it from reading the budget papers. Astonishingly, there is absolutely no mention of the closure in the Council’s financial review of the current year, and the was no mention of the plan to close it in this year’s budget either; you had to guess that it was doomed to close if the Council was going to achieve the planned £0.5m savings on Environmental Services in the budget. It’s also impossible to know from the budget papers how much it would cost to keep it open, since there are no figures for how much has been saved by closing it. And the capital budget for the forthcoming year has no provision for updating the centre, so the Council clearly has no immediate plans for re-opening it.
Given all this, it would be perfectly reasonable to ask the Council to include something in the budget to ensure that the centre can be re-opened at some date in the not-too-distant future.
The Minster Exchange (MX) project appears to be the pet vanity project of the Council Leader and has been beset by difficulties. The final cost of building the centre is about £9.5m. What on earth is it for? The budget for the current year predicted that the Council would get £100,000 in income from the MX Centre. How much income did it actually get? Nothing! Which leaves a £100,000 hole to be made good this coming year. But there’s no business plan to say how this will be achieved.
So, possible questions to the Council could include: How much has the council saved by closing the recycling centre? Are there any plans to reopen it, and how much would that cost? Where’s the MX business plan to assure us that the centre will bring in the projected income?’ (and also, by the way, ‘How much money are the Council’s business partners making on the MX project?’) We assume the Council knows the answers, but will it share them with the people of Cheltenham?
Mike Farmer,
Secretary, Cheltenham Constituency Labour Party