South Wales Evening Post - 4 January 2009
An opposition leader has slammed the Liberal Democrat led administration for leaving Swansea Council vulnerable amid the economic turmoil.
In a bleak new year message, council leader Chris Holley said jobs and services face the axe as the authority struggles to balance its books in the credit crunch era.
The council is facing a £14 million funding black hole between what it wants to spend, and the money it receives from the Assembly.
Each department has been required to look at ways of shaving four per cent off its budget over the next 12 months — but Councillor Holley warned efficiency savings alone would not be enough.
Tory leader Rene Kinzett (pictured) said: "I fear the coming recession will mean more than just job losses at Swansea Council.
"Like the Labour government, this Lib Dem controlled council has wasted money during the good years.
"They spend £100 million on an IT system that doesn't work, paid a private management company millions to install a new payroll system which was more than a year overdue and was then abandoned, spent £11 million on consultants and is up to its eyeballs in borrowed cash.
"At the same time, the ruling Lib Dem/Independent/Plaid coalition has lied to the people of Swansea several times over the start date for work on the promised bus station.
"No promises have ever been kept, yet work on digging up the city centre to make way for bendy-buses nobody wants has been pushed through.
"Shop traders, market stall holders, hoteliers and other business people in Swansea are sick to death of a council which has its priorities so out of step with what everyone else wants.
"Swansea should have benefited greatly over the past ten years of boom in the UK.
"But successive Labour and Lib Dem-controlled councils have failed to exploit the potential for real growth.
"While Cardiff is having its city centre modernised, Swansea can only listen to promises of jam tomorrow."
Response
And yet at successive Council budget meetings Councillor Kinzett has sought to cut back the Council's income further leaving them with more long term problems.
Councillor Kinzett has misrepresented the Council's expenditure in trying to make his point.
He knows that the Council's e-government programme did not cost £100m but has been contained witin the budgets set for it by the outgoing Labour administration in 2004. He even supported the project when he was part of the administration.
He knows also that the £11 million spent on consultants as spent over a four year period, amounts to less than 0.5% of the Council's expenditure over that period and was spent on specialist capital and other projects that could not have proceeded without them.
He also supported the two biggest projects, the Leisure Centre and the new Civic Centre that he now criticises as costing the Council too much money.
All in all this appears to be double standards on the part of Councillor Kinzett.
Peter Black, Swansea
