In Conversation with a Council Leader

Following on from our interview with a Planning Committee Chair last week, we were very pleased to be approached by a Leader of a Council who said they too would talk if they can be anonymous. So, here you have it! An interview with a Leader of a Council – warts and all! 

Henry Lamprecht (HL): Thanks for getting in touch and agreeing to talk to us! First question that won’t surprise you, what is the single biggest issue you face as Leader? 

Council Leader (CL): Great pleasure, I really enjoyed reading the article last week and it resonated with me so I thought, if I can talk to you without being seen as a troublemaker it would help to bring focus to problems. 

The biggest problem we face is money. DCHLG and the Treasury has been cutting Local Government funding for years now and at the same time is giving us more and more responsibilities under the auspices of devolving central Government. The reality is that they really are just moving services to us to pay for that they don’t have money for. This then fragments into numerous problems. The budget that we are currently setting for the next municipal year is quite complicated and frankly, apart from the finance department no one else appears to understand it. We have quite substantial overspends in a few departments, especially housing where our temporary housing bill has increased by over 300%. We need to pay for this and when I took the budget to my group [it is a majority group rather than a coalition] my Councillor colleagues got very upset when we didn’t have the money to do all the nice things. 

We are actively considering reducing our refuse collection to fortnightly, we are assessing our property portfolio, we may have to put up parking charges and so it carries on. We don’t have the money for luxuries like new play equipment in our parks or street light renewal and we have to prioritise what potholes we can fix. We have semi-rural areas and we have to consider how often we can trim the hedges. At this stage, I think it might be once this year. Road resurfacing is but only a distant dream as are planting new street trees or any other substantial improvements. And then we still have to put up our council tax by the maximum the Government allows. 

I will touch on planning and development at this stage too. We are a CiL authority so we potentially have significant money coming in from that but my colleagues on the Planning Committee has refused a number of larger applications in the past year. No approval means no CiL. My colleagues don’t understand that there are implications if you refuse planning applications without good reasons. Two of the appeals last year saw costs awarded on top of our legal fees and the CiL. 

HL: I can relate as a former Councillor that few of our esteemed colleagues pay any attention to the finances. I may be unkind and say it is intrinsic of the State sector that money is just an abstract concept, but I am sure that is not the case! 

CL: (laughing) You may very well think that but I couldn’t possibly comment dear boy! 

HL: How do you fix this? Or should I say, can you even fix this? 

CL: That is a question I have been struggling with for as long as I have been Leader. I was leader of the opposition before and I will confess that I had my fun with the then Leader on the budget and it was only when I took office that I really understood just how grim it is. As for fixing it, I think you can fix it if you can educate you Councillor colleagues in it. No one really comes into Local Government to improve its finances, we come to Local Government to improve services and that costs money. 

I have introduced budget workshops for my colleagues and lead on them myself with my Cabinet colleague who is Cabinet Member for Finance and Resources. Our administration is starting to understand it much better now but sometimes they still forget. Last week I had one of them coming to see me about extra spending in her ward. It was a very laudable and worthy cause and exactly the sort of thing we got elected to do but I had to tell her that there simply isn’t the money. 

I already made the point about the Planning Committee wasting money on refusals, so I won’t go into that again! 

HL: If I could turn your attention to your statutory duties, especially in relation to housing, what do you see as the biggest problem that caused your expenditure to increase by 300%? Is this a “home grown” problem or is this due to immigration as some would lead us to believe? 

CL: Gosh, that is a question and a half. I try and stay on top of the reasons for the increase in a hope that we could stem it and possibly even reverse it. To answer your question on whether it is home grown or immigration, I think it splits out 90/10 with the 90% being home grown. There are a variety of reasons why the pressure has increased so much. I can give you a quick few examples: changing lifestyles where people stay single rather than couple up, lower incomes, break up of families where one of the parents moves out and need a home, domestic violence sadly comes up far too often too. 

Over this past week end I had to deal with a young lady who is 30 and pregnant whose mum and stepfather assaulted her, naturally she couldn’t go back home and on Saturday evening at 11.30pm we had to book her into a hotel. It is not her fault that this happened and it is quite right that we as a Council addresses this but the reality is that this expectant mother and her partner, who I will add is a very hard working key worker on a lower income, should not have been living with her mum and step dad in the first place. They should have a place of their own. They are staring a family in three months time and I wish we had a Council property or a Housing Association that could have put them in a place long ago. But we don’t. We aren’t building enough homes and we haven’t for decades. 

I will just add that this idea that all the homes are being taken up by mysterious and mystical immigrants is nonsense. Yes, we do have some, mainly Ukrainians and Afghans that we helped but this notion that they roll up on the Kent coast and we cart them off to free houses is simply a lie. We do actually have asylum accommodation in our District and it sits completely separately from our core housing service. 

HL: You have been very generous with your time and I would like to thank you for that. My last question is in relation to Local Government Reorganisation. How is it going in your patch and how do you see it playing out? 

CL: Ah, so you left the easiest one till last (laughing). We voted on LGR in our Council and we are full steam ahead. We are having elections this year and yes, those Councillors will only be in post for a year until we vanish and will only be a sweet memory of the olden days. I am completely in agreement that the larger Unitaries make more sense. I started my political career on a London Borough, so I am familiar with how the bigger Unitary Councils work and I think it is a good way forward. There is an awful lot of duplication of administration in Local Government that costs and equally awful lot of money. It will be painful and it will be stressful as the number of Councils, Council officers and Councillors reduce but ultimately, we need to do what is best for the people we represent. Will I be Leader of the next Unitary? I don’t know who will win the election but I would very much like to be the Leader of our new Unitary Council. 

But to make it less about me again, there will be difficult changes. We have already started seeing officers leave the Council and the reality is that we’re not replacing them unless it is absolutely critical to service delivery. 

HL: Thank you for your time and all the best for your election in May! If you do become the Leader, I will come back to interview you again and hear about how you are implementing LGA. 

CL: With great pleasure and tell your readers that we welcome development!