The plans of the EU and Whitehall significantly effect the budgets of Local Councils. The problem is: should Councils spend much time leanring about the EU Regulations that are on the way? If the cost of checking for relevant legilsation is too much, though, the value of doing it may be lost.
Councils are being placed under an impossible burden by Whitehall’s instructions. “You will do this”, “you will do this by this date” and “you must do this without further funding”.
While, in a meeting the other day, I discovered that my colleague had identified £50,000 of savings for Adur (pronounced Aay-Der) I discovered today, while reading for another meeting, that an EU Regulation relating to Food Safety is going to cost us more money.
In that same meeting the other day I discovered that we will have to provide an electronic bidding system for Council housing by 2010 — the cost of which will be met by Council Tax payers, obviously. The choice we have is to do it now with some other Councils or wait until 2010 and do it on our own. So “choice” was the wrong word, then, wasn’t it.
As Daniel Hannan said recently, people like choices to be made locally — their opinions can more easily be heard by a Councillor (two of whom represent 3,921 in Buckingham at the 2001 census) than by an MP or cabinet MP who answers to a whole Parliamentary constituency. Whitehall must stop telling local councils what to do — give Councils the flexibility to do for their people what their people want them to do!
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