An Alternative Budget

Today we debated the County Council's budget, but was it all worth it? The Tory ruling group had already agreed their budget at Cabinet and there was never going to be any turning back. The only differences between their budget and our Opposition budget is that ours put more investment into adult social care, vulnerable children and their families and highways maintenance, which includes our pavements and cycleways.

Most of my casework locally involves road maintenance, safety schemes for the village, the state of footpaths and more recently, flooding. Our Liberal Democrat budget put £4M extra for all this, including flood alleviation measures and re-instating routine weedkilling.

The elderly, the vulnerable and young people are the silent majority who rely on us to provide vital services. The demographic challenge which faces us in Oxfordshire is that as our ageing population grows, the pressures on our ability to deal with this is huge. We need the investment now. This is not helped by the government settlement which favours the northern and metropolitan areas in the country at the expense of those of us in the 'seemingly affluent' south east. We had put in over £5m extra to cover all this.

Surprisingly, all our local MP's with the notable exception of Evan Harris (Lib Dem), didn't help us either. All Conservatives, including our very own Ed Vaizey sat on the fence and abstained when it came to the vote on the local government setttlement in Parliament. What a shame they don't grasp the issues.

Whilst the government expects us to take on more responsibility to provide services, whether it is social care, education or maintaining our roads, with the complicated formula it uses to calculate how 'needy' we are - Oxfordshire loses out.

So in our budget today, we proposed a budget which would invest in all this, well into the future for just £3.93 a year extra on a Band D property or just over 7p a week (a penny a day). But this alternative was thrown out.

Some local schemes which were also thrown out were investment in a new library for Grove in time for the new housing development, and a new youth centre for the village. Both vitally needed. What a shame that whilst Conservatives at County Hall voted to bring more housing to Grove on top of what is already planned, they cannot even spare a little bit for our library or our youth. An opportunity missed, but we shall battle on!