Council Salts away Taxpayers' Money

9.05.54am BST (GMT +0100) Sun 31st May 2009

At last night's meeting of West Berkshire Council's Executive Committee the Council was shown to have salted away £479,000 of taxpayers' money in the bank, instead of using it to bring down the Council Tax rate or to avoid cuts in services.

Opposition Finance Spokesperson, David Rendel, pointed out that the draft final accounts for last year showed that the Council was £479,000 better off at the end of the year than it claimed it would be at budget time.

"The Conservative administration could have set a Council Tax rate calculated to bring in nearly half a million pounds less than the rate they actually set. Along with the reduction which the Liberal Democrats were able to propose this could have almost halved the Council Tax increase form 3.9% to just 2.1%", said Mr Rendel.

"Alternatively the council could have decided to keep open the option for elderly people to get travel tokens AND retained the Free Bulky Waste Collection Service AND given the Pang Valley Project their full grant AND had enough left over (£174K) to bring down the Council Tax rate by roughly a further 0.2%.

"It would have been bad enough", he continued, "if this had been a one-off budgeting error. But the Council does this every year. By overestimating their costs when they are preparing their budget (by £926,000 last year and by £246,000 the year before that), they end up charging the taxpayer far more than they need."