It Gets Worse (David Rendel)

It Gets Worse

June 17, 2009 3:07 PM

The backlog of unspent money provided by developers to improve West Berkshire for its residents grew again last year.

Figures just released to the Liberal Democrat Finance Spokesperson, David Rendel, show that the Council's income from developers in 08/09 was £5.8 Million. This compares to spending of only £4.4 Million.

"The Council is already facing widespread criticism of the huge pot of unspent "Developers' contributions" which it is storing up in the bank", commented David Rendel. "These figures demonstrate that, far from reducing the backlog of spending, the council allowed it to increase still further last year.

"The money is provided by developers to reduce the damage done to an area by their developments. At present local residents are being cheated of the schools, roads, parks and other facilities which ought to have been in place by now.

"The suspicion must be that the Conservatives prefer to leave the money in the bank, and then use the interest earned for their own purposes. As a result, by the time these facilities are built inflation has usually pushed up the cost to well above the amount of money still sitting in the Council's Bank account."

AMENDMENT

Summary

The figures of £4.4 Million for spending and £5.8 Million of income given in the Press Release above were both supplied to me by West Berkshire Council. Both came with the authority of the Conservative Councillor who is their Finance spokesperson. Unfortunately the Council made an error in their calculation of one of these figures.

A full explanation of the position follows.

The Council's Error

The figure of £4.4 Million first appeared in the report which accompanied an item on the agenda for the Council's Executive meeting held on 28/05/09. The item was titled "Capital Programme 2008/09 - Outturn". During the discussion of this item, I requested the comparable figure for income during the year. I was told that the figure was not then available, but that it would be sent to me later in writing.

The figure of £5.8 Million was then sent to me in a letter dated 12/06/09. However I have now been told that the figure was not the comparable figure for which I had asked. Instead the figure also included some income which is due to be used in ways other than as part of the Council's capital spending. I then asked for the figure to be broken down into its various constituents, so that we could tell whether the Council's capital spending derived from Developers' Contributions in 2008/09 had been greater or less than the corresponding income. The reply was that such a breakdown would be immensely time-consuming to produce and that the cost of doing so could not be justified. Sadly therefore we will never know whether the backlog of such capital spending grew again in 2008/09.

I apologise to anyone who like me was misled by the Council's error. Sadly, despite requests, we are still waiting for the Conservatives to apologise to the public for being the original source of the error.