It was about time that I broke my silence on this blog and I know find myself with a big issue to blog on and a lot more time! The reason (as if you didn’t know) was that the Labour cabinet resigned on Tuesday night. I will attempt below to coherently set out the reasons why.
The full council met for the annual budget meeting to agree how it would raise and spend the proposed £338 million revenue budget and the capital budget for the year.(papers can be found at http://www.bristol.gov.uk/item/committeecontent/?ref=ta&code=ta000&year=2009&month=02&day=24&hour=14&minute=00 ) There were 7 amendments tabled to the proposed Labour budget, 1 Tory, 2 Green and 4 Lib Dem. The amounts of money movement in them ranged from the max of £1.5 million and a minimum of £54,000 which in the scale of budget we are talking about are not huge sums of money. We, candidly, could easily have accepted 4 of the 7 amendments.
The three that we would have had difficulty with were the:
- Tory amendment which proposed removing the City’s capacity to deal with community cohesion at a time of severe economic depression
- The Lib Dem amendment that removed our proposal to increase the number of staff dealing with housing benefit claims at a time of severe economic depression.
- The Lib Dem amendment on removing funding that would allow us to complete the initial stages of phase three of the West of England waste strategy.
The first two amendments fell. The third was passed by a Lib Dem/ Tory pact. Which led directly to our resignation. Why?
Phase three of the waste strategy addresses how we will deal with the current and future waste that cannot or is not recycled (known as residual waste) for Bristol, South Gloucestershire and North Somerset. It is the stuff that currently goes to landfill. The Government and the EU currently levy huge tax / fines on all waste that goes to landfill and these fines will increase dramatically over the coming years. The three authorities have agreed to approach government for up to £90m of PFI credits to fund a solution to this problem. The government have set aside a tranche of PFI credits for authorities to deal with waste and decisions will be taken on the allocation of this money within the next month. There are no other tranches of money or credits available.
By passing the waste amendment the Liberal Democrats and Tories have removed Bristol from this process and this means that
- We have no solution for dealing with our residual waste – it will now all go to land fill.
- We have no money to build a solution even if we had one – Bristol Council Tax payers will now have to fund any solutions directly – where will this money come from?
- We have opened ourselves up to a large and growing unnecessary council tax burden in paying landfill fines. This could see our council tax rise by in excess of 10% or see dramatic cuts in services.
- We have destroyed any trust anyone will have in working in partnership with Bristol, because we have not just stopped our plans we have destroyed the plans of our partners.
We resigned because we could not accept a situation where we would open the people of Bristol to the risk of a huge financial liability and at the same time destroyed any trust in Bristol as a reasonable partner to work with. The partnership point is hugely important as whether we like it all not modern politics is dominated by partnership working. All the big infrastructure funding from Government for things like road infrastructure, building new homes, public transport and large scale economic regeneration is given to groups of authorities working in partnership. Who is going to want to work with Bristol when we destroy trust in the way we did on Tuesday night?
You will have noticed in all of the ramblings above I have not mentioned ‘Incinerator’ or ‘Avonmouth’. That is because they are not the point. The strategy agreed and the funding applied for was not based on any final technology or any site. I know that there have been fears about both technology and sites but I have to ask are these fears grounded? And can sending all of our residual waste to landfill be a better option? – Perhaps I will do another blog on this subject.
Finally let me be clear we could have continued in power. But we believed that the destruction of trust in Bristol as partner and the risk of huge financial liabilities on the people of Bristol brought about by this LibDem/Tory pact decision we had no option but to resign.
