There is no doubt that Swansea Council is in deep financial trouble with nearly all services facing drastic cut-backs. But this is not the fault of the Welsh Assembly, which has provided over £5million extra. This desperate situation is the result of your Administration’s ‘borrow and spend’ plans, where you have placed vanity projects over the needs of ordinary people for essential services. You could have avoided this catastrophe – because that is what it is - if you had made better choices.
You cannot continue to max out the Council’s credit card – without there being consequences. And those chickens have now come home to roost.
We have a financial black hole of £17m – which will grow over the next three/four years to £53million – that’s a 200% increase. So that’s another 1,500 to 2,000 extra staff to be made redundant; tennis players deprived of facilities (and we will be proposing an amendment that will save the Tennis Centre), poorer children having to pay for musical instruments, elderly deprived of respite care, city centre residents having to pay to park in their own streets - when visitors can park for free, libraries closed, teachers being made redundant and above all our children’s future being sold off to pay for your incompetence and weak unfocused leadership. You are very good at always seeking someone else to blame – but what is true is that it is others who have to pay for your mistakes.
You should have looked to the private sector solution for delivering the LC2, buses that people needed, not the derided and largely empty ‘purple whale’. We have aspirations to be a major European city – we are certainly unique in one aspect, our train and bus stations are a mile apart. The Library and Call Centre (well as much of it as we have got) are welcome facilities – but in entirely the wrong place and with a funding deficit to renovate St David's still being required. You inherited an outstanding Social Services department and ruined it by failing to invest adequately. The intervention in Children’s Services mess was inevitable.
You have consistently failed on project and financial management – you scrapped Labour’s stringent financial controls that I introduced (the Budget Prioritisation programme) – replacing it with a wish and a prayer, and ignored the concerns of your own officers, because you knew that many of your projects would not stand proper scrutiny.
You have consistently wasted money, £83million on Service@Swansea – over budget and with little to show for it and none of the £26million promised savings, the Civic Centre more than twice its original budget plus huge sums being spent on staff relocations, the LC2 over budget, you have frittered away £68 million in asset sales to cover failures in leadership and with what to show for it?, and you cannot now borrow anymore money, so Qed 2020 is dead in the water - and on and sadly on.
Yes the current financial outlook is bleak but we believe that better choices in these areas would have strengthened Swansea’s ability to withstand the current problems, not only saving over £100million capital but providing an additional £15+ million to invest in services now.
Times are tough and you have been reckless with the assets of the people of Swansea, your decision making has been slow, reactionary and often wrong. I always knew that the price for your rule would be high. Sadly even my fears fell well short of how badly you’ve failed.
This Budget is a shaming indictment of your management and the people of Swansea can see what you get from Lib-Dem/Independent rule – very little expect the bill! This budget should be roundly rejected.
I give notice Presiding Officer that we will be moving two amendments to this budget at the appropriate time.
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