What the Conservatives said at the annual budget council meeting

The second anniversary of the Russian invasion of Ukraine is on Saturday 24 February. On Sunday 25 February, there will be a memorial service in All Saints Church, Hove, from 3pm to 6pm. Do go.

While we in the chamber may often strongly disagree with each other, we are not fighting or dying.  Ukrainians are fighting, and their children are dying, at this very moment, to ensure we can continue to debate and argue. I’m sure we are all grateful for that.

The budget today is about choices.  Would the Labour administration have easier choices to make with more money? Yes. But Labour makes the wrong choices – cutting services used by the most vulnerable people in our community. The elderly, the disabled, poorer people, women and girls facing violence and domestic abuse.

Labour should not be using these vulnerable people to balance the books, while spending money on things we don’t need.

Twelve councils might be bankrupt but after the last Labour government, the whole country was bankrupt.

The council has received more funding from the Conservative government than anticipated, meaning that some of the choices can, and should, be reversed.

In our amendments we show how choices made by Labour can be reversed. They take the worst out of Labour’s cuts to our city’s most vulnerable.

But how did we get here?  What money has been wasted since 2019 under previous Labour and Green administrations? £10 million wasted on insourcing housing repairs. Did the service improve?  No.

The cost of changing how weeds are removed – over £1 million. The weeds are still here. Home to School Transport failings resulted in a £1 million overspend.

The Conservative Group’s first amendment is about people. We oppose Labour’s planned cut to political support. That is, the smooth running of the council.

The budget papers state that political assistants are business critical. Three of the four political assistants were hired during the recruitment freeze, requiring senior officer approval. This alone shows how crucial they are to the council.

It would have been easy to do away with the roles then. I wouldn’t have agreed with it, but it would have reduced the personal impact of hiring excellent people only to make them redundant months later.

This is about democracy. Good governance requires good and effective opposition. Opposition groups don’t have the machinery of the council behind us. But the chairs and deputy chairs of committees do.

Chairs communications are read out from officer written speeches. When amendments are put forward or procedural questions asked, the chairs turn towards the officers for a decision.

I am sure that there is additional work that backbench councillors do not have to do. But are the chairs and deputy chairs, who may never sit in for the chair, really worth £94,000 in total?

Can these councillors look staff being made redundant in the eye and say, “I deserve this money.”

£94,000 on top of the basic allowance is not justifiable for chairs and deputy chairs of committees at a time when severe cuts are being made.

We have not included in this amendment special responsibility allowances for the leader and deputy leader, who undoubtably do a lot of work. They are full-time roles that deserve additional payment.

We have not looked at the £10,000 the mayor receives. The mayor performs an essential role, reaching out to and thanking community groups and individuals.

Make no mistake – cutting political assistants will affect the running of the council. These staff know how councils work and help councillors navigate an often-complicated system so they can help the public ask hard questions of the administration. It will be the public’s loss.

Our second amendment proposes reversing cuts in services affecting the elderly, the young and the vulnerable.

We propose raising the £104,000 required to meet these funding requirements by removing the council’s anti-racism strategy. This would not entail job losses.

Racism is a scourge in society. We should fight it. But we think schools and community groups can tackle it without advice from the council.

At a time when the council is proposing cuts to services used by some of the most vulnerable in our communities such as the elderly, children and women and girls facing violence, we do not feel that £104,000 can be justified to be spent on advice from the council.

Instead, we propose the removal of this role and the £104,000 to help protect violence against women and girls’ services.

Labour is planning a £23,000 cut in home to school transport. This is at a time when they are closing schools leaving more children with further to travel each day. Home to school transport is going to need every penny it can get so we are proposing the reversal of this cut.

Our third amendment proposes to genuinely save public toilets and reinstate the Youth Led Grants Programme.

The Labour administration have repeatedly made big claims of saving public toilets. What they don’t tell you is that this is only the case if you need the toilet after 10am.

Pity help you if you need the toilet before this. The Labour administration suggest you stay at home.  Labour have rushed out a claim they will protect Parkrun. But they’re not rushing out a claim they are protecting those with health needs.

The Conservative group are against these significant cuts in the availability of public toilets. Changing the opening time from 8am to 10am every morning at 31 of 36 locations will see 62 hours a day of access to public toilets lost.

Even considering bank holidays this will amount to over 22,000 hours of access for residents and visitors to public toilets. This is not saving public toilets.

The council’s own equality impact assessment on the proposal states that they will have greater impact on people who need to use facilities more frequently, those with limited mobility and those with limited alternative means for accessing facilities such as older people, small children and their carers, disabled people and individuals with some health issues and rough sleepers.

Labour should stop celebrating the alleged saving of public toilets and be honest with residents that they are cutting the availability of public toilets by thousands of hours a year right across the city.

The Youth Led Grants Programme does so much for young people across our city, including increasing volunteering and work experience opportunities, improving health and wellbeing and offering participation in new and challenging experiences.

The benefits provided by these community organisations will help to improve young people’s mental health and wellbeing.

The proposed pilot of counselling for Year 9 pupils in a handful of schools will replace these opportunities for many with counselling for a few of them.

At a time when the Conservative government is rolling out mental health support teams and funding for mental health leads, it seems an unnecessary thing to do. 44 per cent of pupils are expected to be covered by Mental Health Support Teams by April this year and at least 50 per cent by spring 2025.

The government is also offering all state schools and colleges funding to train a senior mental health lead by 2025.

These are set out in the government’s “suicide prevention strategy”, being led by someone familiar to us, former Brighton and Hove councillor and now Minister for Mental Health, Maria Caulfield MP.

We propose to not move forward with the investment of £200,000 for a pilot counselling in schools scheme and instead invest £80,000 of that money in keeping the Youth Led Grants Programme and the remaining £120,000 to be spent on increasing the opening hours of public toilets.

Surely, keeping a youth-led grants scheme will go a long way to helping young people’s mental health before it becomes a problem.

And at this point, I’d just like to welcome the £2.4 million of Conservative government money to allow food waste collections.  Let’s hope the Labour administration ensure Cityclean make good use of this money.

The Conservative group’s fourth amendment uses the remaining £410,000 of unallocated funds. We want to reverse a number of Labour’s proposed cuts. But we also want to invest additional money in gully clearances across the city.

Community grants are an important area of funding for local charities and community-focused organisations. Looking through the list of groups that received funds in the current year I can say that many of them are very worthwhile organisations.

Residents are able to bid and show council officers all the positive things that their group does for the community, rather than officers or councillors telling people what is best for them.

The Black Ethnic Minority Community Partnership – money gone. The Low Carbon Trust – gone. The Migrant English Project – gone.

Labour wants to cut all the £302,000 Community Grant, affecting hundreds of groups. We propose keeping £200,000. Not as much to go round but still enough to make a big difference to a lot of groups.

We would also like to see £58,000 of this unallocated money used to keep the funding for the 77 Devil’s Dyke and 79 Ditchling Beacon bus services.

Brighton and Hove Active Travel summed up these services well when they said that they are the “two buses that give the greatest benefits to the poorest people”. And that “the council would be kicking people who have the least” by cutting funding to these services.

These bus services provide cheap and easy access to the Downs from the city during the holidays for families. It gives them a chance to get out of a busy polluted city and into the countryside to enjoy all of the physical and mental health benefits of our wonderful South Downs National Park.

But Labour wants to deny these benefits to the users of these buses. No exploring the countryside with the kids. No picnic on the Downs. You can stay home during the holidays instead. But the funding for these services does not need to be stopped.

This amendment also proposes reversing Labour’s £87,000 cut to community transport Easylink Shopping Service, shop mobility and the Disability Advice Centre.

Are Labour seriously trying to balance the council’s budget on the backs of the city’s disabled and vulnerable?

These cuts will have serious implications on the lives and wellbeing of older residents and disabled people who use them.

Service users already pay a minimum £6 to use the Community Transport Easylink Shopping Service. The removal of over £40,000 of funding will surely mean price rises that are unaffordable and therefore the possible end of this service.

The same can be said of Shopmobility. 91 per cent of users rate the service as good or excellent. These people pay £5 to £10. With Labour wanting to cut over £20,000 of funding, how can this be made up from price rises? Will the service still be affordable?

The Disability Advice Centre is used each year by 4,500 disabled people and their families seeking help and advice. Where are Labour proposing they turn to for help?

The equality impact assessment on these proposals shows just how cruel Labour are being with their budget proposals.

The assessment reads: “All three savings proposals will disproportionately impact on disabled people.”

It continues: “No consultation or engagement has been carried out to inform this assessment.”

It speaks for itself. These are cuts hitting the most vulnerable in our city, without even a consultation or any engagement. It is shameful and should be stopped.

As well as reversing Labour cuts to services used by the most vulnerable, we want to protect our residents from the devastating effects of flooding.

As a group we have been raising the issue of flooding and sewage and the need for additional gully clearances across the city for a very long time.

Now we are proposing using £65,000 of the unallocated funding for additional gully clearances across the city.

The investment of £65,000 would help clear the backlog of infrastructure maintenance and introduce a regular programme of leaf removal at 61 high-risk sites throughout the winter period.

At our last full council meeting we had a resident from Woodingdean telling us of the flooding problem in his area.

We have seen it in our wards and across the city. Patcham and Hollingbury suffers from severe flooding, and it’s getting worse.  Now we are giving Labour the opportunity to show residents they care about flooding in the city.

This amendment also includes a point for future years. Originally in our budget discussions we wanted to remove the £125,000 investment in cycle hangar maintenance as, when they were brought in, we were told that they would be cost neutral. £125,000 is far from cost neutral.

We therefore think that the current £1 per week charge is clearly far too low. We would like to see considerations made to increase the fee to ensure that the cycle hangars, which are a luxury and not a statutory service, should be cost neutral as promised.

A charge of £5 a week would cover the maintenance costs and allow any extra money to be invested in additional cycle hangars.

We should not be paying £125,000 towards a policy that was promised as cost neutral while cutting funding from services for the disabled and vulnerable.

We understand that this cannot be implemented in this budget and we cannot stop the £125,000 spending but we want to make this point and have it considered for the future.

Today the choice faced by us in this chamber is clear. Do we want to be cutting services for the disabled? For the elderly? The poorest in our city? For women and girls facing violence? Do you want to cut grants to important community and youth groups?

We know that we in the Conservative group do not want to. The Labour administration would rather spend your money on a T-junction.

We have shown in our amendments that you do have a real choice to reverse at least some of these planned cuts. You don’t have to go ahead with them, blaming the government or past administrations.

You can choose to do the right thing by backing our four amendments and reducing the impact this budget will have on our most vulnerable residents.