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Richmond upon Thames Liberal Democrats:Covering the constituencies of Twickenham and Richmond Park |
‘Hard-up’ council heading for £2.5 million surplus
March 13, 2011 10:38 AM
• [Feb 18]: DESPITE claims earlier in the year that Richmond Council had to cut vital services for vulnerable young people because it couldn't afford to keep them going, budget monitoring papers published this week show the Council is expecting to end the year with a surplus of more than £2.5 million - five times the amount saved by the youth service cuts. The Conservative-run Council slashed spending on services for young people last September, in response to the loss of some government grant funding. At the time, Liberal Democrats argued that the Council could and should absorb the costs in order to protect these important services.
Cllr Stephen Knight, Leader of the Liberal Democrat Opposition, said: "These were brutal and shortsighted cuts to preventative services and support for vulnerable young people. We said in September that the Council could absorb the cost of the services and we have been proved right. With the budget running at a surplus of over £2.5 million, the council could easily have found the £500,000 needed to protect youth services."
Note: Services cut at the September Cabinet Meeting in order to save £500,000 were:
• Advice to schools on health issues
• Cutting a number of youth projects, including the Outskirts magazine, the Kicks project in Ham and any educational input into the local Youth Offending Team.
• Drastic cuts to the Connexions service which provides education and careers advice to young people, reducing its opening hours from 35 hours a week to just 16 hours
• Scrapping of all positive activities for young people projects
• Scrapping of work tackling teenage pregnancy.
• Scrapping the young people's substance misuse service, stopping important preventative work.
• Scrapping work to ensure every young person between 16-19 has an opportunity to be in education, training or employment.
• Training and support for primary school teachers in raising standards of literacy and numeracy
• Training and support for secondary school teachers in raising standards in english and maths and in tackling poor behaviour and attendance problems.
• Richmond Council approves 'drastic' cuts of £12m in next year's budget [RTT 4th March]
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