Mr Mayor,
Tonight, this Labour administration is asking the hard-working people of Medway to pay the absolute maximum in Council Tax, to receive less in services, and to foot the bill for their continued, staggering financial incompetence.
Let us look directly at the Leader of the Council. What exactly is his legacy shaping up to be? It is a legacy defined by a fundamental failure to balance the budget. A legacy of a huge, reckless increase in borrowing, and the crippling debt interest that follows it.
Let us be absolutely clear about what this budget represents. It is not balanced. It is propped up by an extra £10M of borrowed money just to plug this year’s black hole.
Mr Mayor, the word “exceptional” implies an unprecedented, one-off emergency. But under the Leader of the Council, begging the Government for a bailout has ceased to be an exception. It has become his deliberate financial strategy.
With an additional £10M for the current year, the total EFS bailout will hit a staggering £62M by the time this Council ceases to exist, assuming the equally terrible Government does not do another U-turn. £62M! Cllr Maple is putting the day-to-day running of this council on a virtual Medway credit card, and expecting the taxpayers of Medway and residents of the new North Kent Unitary to pay the interest for his abject failure.
And what an interest bill it is. Next year, we will hand over nearly £25M just to service debt. That’s an increase of £3.5M in a single year. We see £44M of new capital borrowing for the IPM Care Home—a project that adds £2.7M of revenue pressure just in interest payments alone!
But when the Leader isn’t maxing out the council’s credit card, he is allowing ideology to get in the way of common sense. Take the politically motivated move to end our relationship with Medway Norse—a decision driven entirely by dogma, not economics, and one the taxpayer will ultimately pay for.
And then, Mr Mayor, we have the School Street Scheme. Let us call it exactly what it is in this chamber: it is absolute Highway Robbery. It is nothing more than a cash grab, penalising hard-working parents and motorists to desperately plug the gaps of their own financial mismanagement.
They claim there is no money. Yet, somehow, they have found £500,000 for discretionary high street projects that have no chance of moving the dial. They have found £250,000 just to lock and unlock park gates. And, predictably, they have found hundreds of thousands of pounds to expand the number of spin doctors.
No administration borrows to pay for PR officers unless you are this bad.
Mr Mayor, the Leader regularly praises his Cabinet for its diversity, but his and their legacy is written into this document. This Labour budget is not a financial plan; it is a bankruptcy note waiting to happen. It is fiscally reckless, it is an insult to the taxpayers of Medway, and I urge this chamber to reject it.
