Opinion: The Labour Difference In Reading

by Cllr Rachel Eden (@racheleden)

Last night we took more than 10% - 12.6 MILLION out of the council's budget. That followed on from the previous year's cuts of £19 million (according to last year's Conservative press release), so decisions were always going to be painful - We might have expected so unpalatable decisions and the opposition groups lining up to attack our budget, that's what happened last year with a budget which was described as 'cutting everything but the grass'.

Instead I woke up this morning to hear that according to BBC Berkshire, we and Labour-controlled Slough had frozen council tax, protected frontline services through back office savings and made 'the usual' increases in other fees. What a contrast to the Conservative-run councils that surround us.

In fact I was shocked that the most contentious issue of the debate appeared to be a disagreement between the two smallest parties about whether or not an extra dog warden would solve the issue of dog fouling.

So what is the Labour difference?

The Conservatives believe that 'Conservative polices are working' - tell that to the library users in Tory-run Oxfordshire, elderly people in West Berkshire, or young people in Bracknell (and don't get me started on Wokingham). The whole group spent their speeches talking about what dull accountants like me think of as the 'top half' of the budget - the income, how pleased they were that council tax was being frozen and that purely based on that they would support our budget. Well yes, your income matters but it also matters what you do with that money, last year's Conservative budget and the Conservative budgets from around the 'Royal County' and elsewhere showed what happens if you just look at the top half and the kind of decisions you end up with. Labour in contrast has agonised about each and every cost and saving - working together as a cabinet to protect services.

The LibDems showed what they like to think of as 'flexibility' and voted with 'any party' that would give them a small item off their wish list, in this case oddly enough a key request was a reversal of their own previous year's cut in the graffiti team! I think it's clear that the LibDems are increasingly an irrelevance in Reading and hardly work the effort of voting for, if you want a champion for your local area or a real say in how decision are taken it's got to be Labour.

The Greens proposed we increase council tax by approximately £45 for the average household only to hand over about £30 of it the government for no benefit. They had no particular proposal of what to do with the remaining cash, which would be less that £700,000 when we were saving £12,600,000.  This is gesture politics at its most pointless made more problematic by comments made before the meeting so misleading that the non-partisan Director of Education and Children's services took the unusual step of writing an open letter to him correcting his factual accuracy. The residents of Park ward deserve better than this.

Only Labour is standing up for Reading, keeping our promises (remember the Green bin tax?) and put the needs of our whole community before politics.

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Cllr Rachel Eden is Lead Councillor for Housing and Neighbourhoods on Reading Borough Council. This blog post was re-produced in an edited form with her permission, if you'd like to read the full blog post please visit http://www.racheleden.blogspot.com