Super-council sums don’t quite add up

Aug 1 2008 by Dave Black, The Journal

MAJOR questions were raised yesterday over whether Northumberland’s new super-council will be able to fulfil a pledge that it will save £17m to be ploughed back into improving public services.

The successful bid submitted to the Government to create the all-purpose unitary authority promised it would generate the savings after four years by improving efficiency and cutting bureaucracy – with the £17m being re-invested in frontline services. Now councillors have been told that the new authority will have to make budget cuts totalling £55m in the first four years of its existence, just to balance the books.

In theory, that means total savings of £72m would have to be found between next year and 2013 in order to honour the pledge made to Government ministers and plug the emerging budget shortfall.

Yesterday, the increasingly challenging financial outlook prompted fresh questions over the validity of the single unitary bid submitted to the Government two years ago by leaders of the then Labour-controlled county council.

It emerged during a budget debate at a meeting of the county’s Joint Transition Forum, a collection of county and district councillors overseeing the switch to unitary local government in April next year.

County council finance director Steven Mason said a new report setting out the £55m efficiency savings likely to be required in the next four years did not include any savings for re-investment in services.

Blyth Valley borough councillor Bob Watson said it was clear the unitary council was not on course to achieve the promised £17m efficiency savings, which were expected by Government ministers.

Conservative group leader, Coun Peter Jackson, said: “Many of us think this £17m efficiency figure is not achievable. We really need to know why we were led so badly wrong two years ago.”

The bid for a single unitary authority was preferred by the Government to a rival submission from the six district councils for two separate unitaries.