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No idea over council funding

Document Cited in Related
Vincent
Published date06 April 2024
Publication titleHuddersfield Daily Examiner
Let's start with the idea of breaking up Kirklees Council. I am totally indifferent about the principle of this, but whilst there will undoubtedly be some people who would welcome it, the reality is this is just 'pie in the sky', and extremely unlikely to happen any time soon

The two main stumbling blocks to this are: ¦ The current direction of travel is for existing councils to be grouped together to create bigger Local Authorities, rather than existing Councils been broken down into smaller Local Authorities. A good example of this happened in North Yorkshire in 2023 when the former seven District Councils of Craven, Hambleton, Harrogate, Scarborough, Richmondshire, Ryedale and Selby were amalgamated to form North Yorkshire County Council. ¦ Breaking up Kirklees Council would almost inevitably lead to pretty significant financial diseconomies of scale, the duplication of some costs, and a higher overall bill in total for us Council tax payers in the Kirklees area to pick up - unless the Government could somehow be persuaded to provide some additional money to cover this, something which seems extremely unlikely in the current financial climate.

Moving on to the topic of Kirklees Council's current financial problems , Mr.Bray persists with trying to lay the blame for this on mismanagement by the current Labour administration , something which is clearly for the most part at least, just not true.

Several key facts which never see the light of day in any of Mr Bray's numerous and fact-free letters on the subject are: ¦ By the end of the decade of austerity Kirklees Council had lost Government funding of the thick end of £200 million per year, and the cumulative amount of Government funding the council had had taken away from them during this period was well on the way to £1 billion. All this has helped pave the way for Kirklees Council's current financial problems in that any relatively easy savings there may have been in their revenue budgets 'back in the day' disappeared a long time since, and it also significantly weakened the council's...

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