Mr Mayor, for the third consecutive year,

I am unsurprised, but nevertheless disappointed, to have to open this speech and talk about the depressing council tax increase for our residents of 3.21%

An increase of 3.21% means that a property in Band D now attracts an annual council tax of £1630.

Once again the residents of Kingston will be paying the Highest Council Tax in London.

We are very grateful - most of us are - that the Conservative Mayor of London had the foresight and empathy to at least attempt to ease the strain on householder’s wallets by freezing the mayoral precept.

Without the freeze on the London component - our Council Tax would have been even higher - we would have been paying an astonishing 3.99%

This is a council tax set by the Party - the Liberal Democrats who claim a new national policy of low taxes – their Leadership recently announced that they were now the Low Tax Party.

I am afraid you just cannot believe them - Lib Dem Richmond our neighbours - and Kingston upon Thames are amongst the highest Council Taxes in the country and they claim low taxation as a mantra.

Is this cynical and hypocritical? -- yes of course it is.

This Budget is not based on financial management, grounded in detailed business plans, but is rather built on hope with a touch of a gamble about it..

It’s called the One Council Project. I am happy to consider wonderful concepts when I read fairy stories to my grand children but when I look at the Council’s Budget, I need more than that. This is a Budget based on vague project descriptions, and talks only of potential, no reality not concrete plans with detailed costing. I am sorry, but I can not accept a Budget built on hope and faith alone. This One Council Project is too loosely defined – too slow – too little and too late.

When I said that an opportunity had been missed in my Budget speech last year, and the year before that I praised some re-organisation of the Environment Services Dept and said that the Council needed to smartly get on with such projects across the whole council. When praising that particualr initiative by the then Director of Environmenmtal Services to cut and phase out redundant costs I had little idea that the Executive would then phase out vulnerable people’s services like Springboard and Hobkirk House and launch an assault on the eligibility criteria.

I can only shake my head at the arrogance of an administration that can do these things, while blithely giving the theatre £600 000 this year, next year, and the year after. One point eight million pounds over three years – tax payers money – in a recession – with people suffering real finnacial hardship. It is hardly good management of the Council’s scarce resources.

I do know that this side of the house works flat out, and will continue to do so to ensure that services for those that need it the most will always, every time, take precedence in our minds and be uppermost on our Agendas.

What do you get for your money in Kingston.? Not value for money that’s for sure. Effective – cost effective services - appropriate financial mamngement - no A high level of incompetence in contract management and performance – yes

This is born out year after year by the qualification of the Council’s Annual Accounts with similar statements to the following: We have a need to improve the quality and consistency of project management; There are a number of fundamental and significant weaknesses; there is not a culture of identifying and assessing risks…

I could go on and on but it is absolutely clear that our corporate governance and internal auditing is dire and represents a massive risk. We had more than four years of reports to heed the warnings and get it right; another missed opportunity, and proof that the lib dems have lost their way, even when the right way was signposted for them with a list of recommendations.

And now I want to refer to the report for 2007 to 2008 by the audit commission and highlight two areas in particular. In the area of financial reporting and in the accounts we produce we have gone from our 2007 score of performing well to ‘below minimum requirements, inadequate performance.’
In Internal Control, for the arrangements that we are meant to have in place to ensure probity and propriety in the conduct of our business, what has happened? We have plummeted from our 2007 rating of performing well to another depressing score of ‘below minimum requirements, inadequate performance.’

I am sure that every resident of the Borough who along with me, pays London’s highest council tax will be pretty mortified that we can slip in this way. Can we really have an such an incompetent administration?

Incidentally, the final recommendation from the Audit Commission is as follows: “Ensure that draft accounts presented for audit do not contain material errors.” Isn’t that pretty damning, but it sums up this administration succinctly enough: it contains material errors, and it is an inadequate performance which is below minimum requirements, and not good enough for our residents.

Now lets take a look at the Waste and Recycling services – the Quadron contract and the Education Dept.

It is clear that there are teething problems with the waste and recycling service. Let me make it clear that we on our side are supportive of the weekly collection of recyclate. It has been a policy in our manifesto for the last two local elections. We are content that the recycling rate has improved dramatically just as we predicted it would when this change of service was made.

We are told that the problems experienced at the beginning of the roll-out in service from Veolia are to be expected.

But lets examine the issues: Five vehicles on occasion to do a job previously done by one and which should be now completed by two vehicles.

But we don’t have the proper vehicles available so we have to make do with a hotch potch of old vehicles resulting in complaints about missing collections – rubbish and recyclate being mixed up in inappropriate vehicles and a whole host of other complaints.

What cost to the Council for this farce of a service? We are told that the cost is born by the contractor or partner as we prefer to call contractors in this day and age.

Are we really to believe that the extra man power and resource engaged in recalls to sort out the many problems reported not only to Councillors direct – on both sides of the chamber – but also to the Call Centre which has had well over an extra 68,000 calls – mostly about problems with the service.

The Leader told us recently only two of those calls were compalints about the waste collection and recycling service. I leave you to decide where the truth lies in that little story. What I want to know is, are we getting a rebate, a discount, a refund for the first 6 months of this service?

With anything between three and five vehicles in the first six months doing the job are we really being green – is this Administration taking account of the carbon deficit for all this heavy transport ? Has it done the sums? How long will it take to recover that deficit?.

However what I would say is that we should also be looking beyond this immediate issue of recycling and as I have said before, we should be tackling the even bigger questions of renewable energy like Combined Heat and Power (CHP), which is actually well established in countries like Denmark and the Netherlands.

Combined Heat and Power plants can be as much as 95 per cent efficient – according to Greenpeace. We need an energy revolution; I would ask that this administration also sets its sights on these bigger issues.

As far as the Quadron contract is concerned – it is working so well that residents are now being asked to look after the wayside gardens outside their homes. There is not enough money in the kitty to do all the work expected of Quadron and the contract limits what they have to do.
It appears that there are more public areas of garden and lawn to look after than were declared in the original contract and we do not have enough in the kitty to look after the landscape.
I cannot be the only person who is, to put it mildly, very concerned that the executive member who was in charge of negotiating the waste contract and the Quadron contract is now heading up the ‘One Council’ project that is touted as the shiny new answer to everything. Another disaster waiting to happen?

We are told by the Executive that this One Council is the ‘way forward’ with the potential to save up to £8m. But when we asked questions about this at Scrutiny, there were no answers.
We were told that there has been “some success” in service re-alignment, but there are 10 projects in the One Council Programme and there is not a detailed budgetary analysis to speak of for any of them, with only 3 of these projects to be completed by April. Where is the robust, detailed financial planning? Where is the time frame for these projects? – I’ll tell you there isn’t one and the April date for the three projects which should be finished by then seemed to be produced out of thin air at the Scrutiny panel last week.

Along with the predictable above average increase in council tax, I am depressed to have to categorically state, again, and I will keep saying it, that the rescue subsidy spent on The Rose Theatre is probably the one thing that best summarises what this administration is all about. Pet projects, regardless of cost, with apparently no need to devise a business plan and due diligence only now reaching completion some months later.

This is arrogance, this is willful, this is inept, this flies in the face of business sense, prudence, responsible accountability, is staggeringly arrogant in its incompetence, is not what most of the residents’ of the Borough want and this is going to come back and bite this incompetent administration.

Corporate governance is abysmal. The contract for New Malden High Street has now incurred a colossal blow-out which is directly because of Lib Dem incompetence. Businesses there have gone bust. In an increasingly tough economic climate, the last thing, a bricks and mortar business needs is to have its core clientele, passing street customers, physically prevented from entering because of road works.
Disastrous project management is expensive, it is inexcusable and it is simply not good enough, in fact it is negligent amybe criminal. The failures of Quadron, the disaster of New Malden High Street, the unsatisfactory performance from Veolia, these are not the successes that inspire anyone to think that the One Council will somehow magically solve everyone’s problems.

Perhaps one of their biggest failings is getting it so very wrong in education policy with insufficient classroom places for secondary and primary school children. The Conservative Education Team, over many years has tried to make the administration see sense in the demand for school places.
Instead we were ridiculed and called deeply irresponsible for suggesting that we might need to look at capacity and consider how we could provide additional places. Dennis Doe and Nick Kilby certainly seem to be well vindicated on this one.

Well the Executive were certainly caught napping last year when over 200 children did not have a place. Everyone now seems agreed that we need a new secondary school and may be as many as two new primary schools.

They cannot afford to mess up our children’s education like this, and blame everyone else but themselves. We have no confidence that this issue has gone away or that we are any nearer resolving this.

Over £2million will have been spent on temporary classrooms to patch up the primary school issue – a new school would have probably cost £5 million and will be required in the end at any rate. This Executive is praying that the government will bale us out and finance a new secondarty school.
We can see from Prudential borrowing that it has been used for short term gain for the short term vote - and long term debt. We agree that Prudential borrowing can be a good and sound way of paying for important capital programmes like education but instead it is spent on shoddy road works that dont last more than three or four years. Another missed opportunity and a misuse of resources. Over £11 million pounds a year to repay the outstanding debts that this Council has accrued for many of these short term repairs.

In my first budget speech two years ago, I advised that we should stop the previous practice of ineffectual small cuts here and there without a strategic plan, the salami slicing approach to financial management. This has not been heeded, and now it seems that the approach is not slicing but dicing – even smaller cuts cloaked in a buzz word “One Council” – a glossy plan – which they are good at - in a desperate bid to show that they haven’t completely lost their way.
We need an administration that is willing to look at the senior management team of the Council and not only agree a new fancy name from Corporate Development Team to Strategic Leadership Team – more spin than substance - but to decide whether it is fit for purpose.
We need a close look at whether we are in fact overweight in the area of highly paid personnel and if the high salaries paid to nearly 200 senior staff are justified. Hopefully the One Council project will look closely at this issue – that Kingston has a cadre of senior officers earning a total of nearly 12million pounds a year. It is interesting that our highest outlay is for personnel and payment for personnel -there is plenty of management speak but no mention of personnel numbers and payment in any of the One Council project descriptions.

An approach perhaps more in line with Hammersmith and Fulham would be appropriate. The Conservative administration there has demonstrated brilliantly how a cost effective council can be run. After almost 4 decades in opposition, the Conservatives took control in the Hammersmith and Fulham Council elections in 2006. Since that time, the Conservative Council have cut council tax by 3% three years in a row.

Average council taxes in H and F are now £350 lower than they would have been had the Council maintained the previous rate of increased spending. Competitive tendering and good management and financial planning has had the double benefit of improving services while cutting costs. Hammersmith and Fulham, Chelsea and Kensington, Hounslow, Wandsworth and Boris’s London are models to follow not Richmond and other high spending Liberal Democrat administrations.

Mr Mayor we are fed up paying the highest Council tax in London, the residents are fed up with paying the highest Council tax in London – we demand more for our money and we demand lower taxation.

Mr Mayor I cannot support this budget as presented.