For Labour, losing control of Swansea Council has been a painful experience. Until 2004 they ran the local authority here for well over 60 years, with just a break of three years in the 1970s due to some local difficulties. Many could just about live with losing the Council in 2004, however they expected to win it back four years later and when they did not do so their Council group went into self-destruct mode.
For their Leader, David Phillips the budget crisis the Council faces this year must seem like manna from heaven. He has been alleging for years that the Council leadership is hapless, incompetent and worse, now he believes he has been vindicated and he is determined to press home his advantage.
His problem though is that facts as he portrays them do not match up to the reality and that the artiface of incompetence and mismanagement he has constructed is rooted in the shifting sands of his own Labour’s Government’s financial crisis and is starting to collapse already. Where he is in danger is that his head is firmly buried in those sands even as they move to undermine his arguments.
His other problem is that whilst he makes out that Swansea is alone in the budget crisis it faces, Councils all around, including Labour run ones, are facing similar financial dilemmas and coming up with even more drastic solutions. Homes are being closed, services are being privatised and jobs are being lost in nearly all of Wales’ 22 Councils. This is a UK-wide crisis not a Swansea one.
Councillor Phillips has summed up his critique in a 500 word essay for the South Wales Evening Post in which he also tries to outline how his party would have done things differently. Unfortunately, even if we discount his selective use of facts, the conveniently forgotten history of previous Labour Administrations in Swansea leaves him without a leg to stand on.
Phillips does not get off to a good start by claiming that the Council’s financial position is not the fault of the Welsh Government, which has provided over £5million extra. What he does not point out however is how dependent the Council is on that grant. Nearly 80% of the Council’s expenditure is funded by central government grant. Although the £5 million extra is welcome it is nowhere near enough to meet the extra spending commitments the Council has had to take on because of the recession and circumstances beyond its control.
A 40% increase in the number of vulnerable children taken into care together with the sort of investment in Children’s Services that Labour have been clamouring for has led to an extra £6.429m going into that service next year. The Council has also had to increase spending on Adult Services by £2.375m due to an increasing elderly population.
The recession has meant that the Council has reduced income on its property investments of nearly a million pounds. Reduced drainage team income of £280,000 adds to the burden. Long term neglect of the Council’s buildings by previous Labour Administrations means that we need to spend more on maintenance. And then there are costs that are outside the Council’s control including the £2.248m cost of the teacher’s pay award, an extra £100,000 on youth services due to changes to the Welsh Government’s standards, £1.286m extra on Special Educational Needs due to increased demand, £100,000 extra on Criminal Records Checks and nearly £500,000 more on pension contributions. Even David Phillips must concede that £5 million extra does not go very far in the face of those demands, none of which are due to mismanagement or incompetence.
All of this of course puts the Labour Leader’s claim that ‘Swansea’s desperate situation is the result of the Lib-Dem/Independent Administration’s ‘borrow and spend’ plans, placing vanity projects over the needs of ordinary people for essential services,’ into context. What are these vanity projects? The reopening of the Leisure Centre that a previous Labour Administration’s incompetence closed? The new and very popular library and contact centre that in the former’s case was necessary because of Labour’s neglect of the old central library?
All of these are capital projects that were wanted by local people. The immediate problem is revenue though capital funding is also under pressure because Labour and Plaid Ministers have failed to offer sufficient transport or educational capital grants to the City, in contrast to other Councils who have had more than their fair share in a per capita basis.
So we are are told that Swansea Labour would have done things differently. They would have pursued a private sector solution to the LC2, delivering a new Leisure Centre at nil cost, as they did with the Liberty Stadium. Really? Where would they have built the new out-of-town shopping centre to fund this Leisure Centre, especially as they seem to be opposed to such developments? Why, having closed the Leisure Centre in the first place, did none of these plans exist when they lost control in 2004? This is opportunistic and fantasy politics. Nobody believes Labour could have delivered this.
And how exactly could Labour have introduced more efficient management arrangements at both the LC and the Stadium to produce savings of over £4.5 million per year? The current subsidy for the LC is less than Labour were paying out on the old Leisure Centre, whilst Labour’s incompetence on the Liberty Stadium is legendary. They built it without undersoil heating and without providing the budget to fit out the bars.
And then Phillips has a go at the Service@Swansea IT project, which he says cost £83m cost. He is right that this project did not produce the anticipated savings however, most of the cost he quotes is not new money but down to existing budgets and staff being moved into the service. Apart from the payroll, the actual cost of this project remains within the budget Labour set for it in 2004 when they initiated it. I suspect that the savings Labour believe they could have made on this project are as fictional as the £26m originally claimed for it by its proponents at the beginning of the process.
What I enjoyed most about David Phillip’s article were his claims on the bus station and the Metro. It has already been shown that it was Labour who initiated the Metro project and that it was funded by specific transport grant. Phillips says that Labour would have redirected the £13.5m costs of the Metro towards providing a bus/rail interchange at the railway station and redeveloping High St/Dyfatty. However, it was the administration that Phillips was a Cabinet Member in and which ran Swansea between 1999 and 2004 that insisted that the bus station should be redeveloped by the Quadrant.
It is funny how easily that is forgotten. Again, the proposed savings and use of grant do not add up, largely because they do not fit in with the history of the development. It is easy to throw these figures around when you are in opposition but not so easy when running the place and you have a whole range of other factors to take into account.
Phillips criticises the cost of the Civic Centre and new Library and says that Swansea Labour intended providing these facilities in the St David’s Centre, avoiding staff relocation costs of at least £500,000 and £300,000 annual rental. So did we. However, the cost of buying out the St David Centre lease was prohibitive and would have added to the cost, not saved money.
The Labour Leader claims that the £68 million received from asset disposals would have been invested in Swansea’s future. Where does he think the money has gone? It has been spent on putting right Labour’s failures on schools, leisure, roads maintenance, the Guildhall, and the many other buildings the Council own that were left to fall into disrepair. That is an investment in Swansea’s future and it is one that decades of Labour rule failed to make.
He goes on to say that Swansea Labour would have passed on all of the increases provided by the Assembly in the last 6 years to Education and Social Services and absorbed at least some of the cost of teacher’s pay settlements. In fact that is what has been happening. It is only this year that it has not proved possible to do that. And let us not forget that in the dark days of Tory rule back in the 1990s it was Labour who failed to fully fund the teacher’s pay award just as we have had to do now.
Things get a bit farcical when the Labour Leader claims that he would have provided the full cost of the school rebuild at Penyrheol Comprehensive and worked with the Welsh Government to secure funding for a proper by-pass for the Hafod. If Labour had installed sprinklers the first time Penyrheol burnt down we may not have been in this position. More importantly, would they really have overlooked better cases for school improvement to curry political favour in Gorseinon? What sort of priority is that?
As for the Hafod by-pass, this was the number one priority in a succession of Transport Grant bids under Labour and it got nowhere. The Labour-run Welsh Government did not want to know. It is only the current Liberal Democrat-led administration that has made some progress on this. Do Labour really want to prevent this by-pass being built?
Finally, Phillips says that Labour would keep the Tennis Centre open by scrapping the Presiding and Deputy Presiding Officer posts and reviewing the current Special Responsibility Allowance system. This is the same system of course that Labour introduced so that every Labour Councillor received an extra payment. It was also Labour who introduced the PO and DPO so they should know that the savings from cutting those posts would come nowhere near the £2 million needed over ten years to keep the Tennis Centre open. More gesture politics.
The Labour Leader talks a good talk but alas his rhetoric does not stand up to scrutiny. That will not stop Monday’s Council meeting being a long and acrimonious one. Labour cannot help themselves.
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