Budget Madness

Nothing brings home how futile life can be as a Councillor as the round of meetings that occur at budget time.

We haven't got to the big one yet, which is the full Council meeting, for the moment we have a round of scrutiny committees who have been asked to look at sections of the budget. The sections were given to us at very short notice and don't look anything like a budget you'd expect to get in the private sector, so it's all a bit tricky.

Theoretically at the full council meeting any Councillor can propose a change to the budget, to add/remove/increase/reduce something. Except there's no chance of this happening, because the ruling majority is too large (and some would argue that a good number of Councillors consider the few thousand bonus they get as Chairman of committees more important than listening to an argument about whether we should really be cutting Connexions funding for the 3rd year running. About £200k lost this year.)

Of course what they'll actually say is that they don't think changes should be considered at Council when the thing has been adequately scrutinized in advance. Which to a great extent is true.

Or is it?

Firstly, from an day to day expenditure point of view, the information we have is minimal. I have no idea what the Children's and Families stationary budget for the year is, so I'd have no chance of reducing the number of pencils they all take home. (Not that I should really care about looking into things at this resolution). Consider all those aspects unscrutinized.

The information we have about the capital spend is much better, but it still seems that nothing can be done about each item.

For example, we are down to spend £280,000 next year on the next stages on ContactPoint. This is a computer database which will hold details of every Child in Britain. It's intention is to protect Children from harm, but why this couldn't be better achieved by having a database of Children at risk rather than collecting arbitrary information about every boy and girl I don't know.

More criticism here:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/libertycentral/2009/sep/15/contactpoint-child-databases

Oddly, Cheshire East has become a pilot for this scheme and that is why the money will be spent. I say oddly, because the Conservative oppose ContactPoint and will be scrapping the scheme should they win the election next year. Therefore it's a mystery to me why the Conservative controlled Council has got involved in it.

So why spend this money if the plug may be pulled next year? Rather than spending money on technology and administration that won't actually help anybody, why don't we give it to an organisation that actually does improve outcomes for Children. Of course I'm actually talking about the aforementioned Connexions again.

I couldn't get an answer out of anyone for that. All I was told when I suggested we didn't spend anymore was that we had to because it's a mandatory scheme. (Except it seems that it's not).

So given my experience, I don't consider the budget has been scrutinised in advance, and that's a very worrying thought.