Debt or Deceit?

Written by Councillor John Bailey and published in Western Gazette on Thu 17th Dec 2009

Dear Sir,

"Debt has increased every year. The County Council should maximise its capital investment programme and hence use up all its borrowing approvals. It is often necessary to borrow to take maximum advantage of capital grants."

These are the words of the last Conservative Leader of Somerset County Council, justifying the decision of the Conservatives to increase debt by 42% to £102 million over the 4 years of their control until 1993.

The Liberal Democrats initially used the same principle. However, there was a considerably smaller rate of increase over the past 16 years. Without using the Government's permissions to borrow, our children would still be using outside Victorian toilets at school and have water dripping on them during lessons, our roads would be impassable and our libraries closed. Since the government changed the rules and allowed councils to borrow in order to meet the needs of their communities, Somerset County Council, in line with other rural counties, has taken full advantage of this. We have used capital to build new schools and libraries with further investment in our roads and streetlights, maintaining them to a good standard.

The 'inconvenient truth' for the Conservatives is that the Liberal Democrats left them very sound finances, with top ratings from independent inspectors for Value for Money and very good assets indeed. Without further investment under the present Tory administration, the state of the county's roads, streetlights and schools will very quickly deteriorate. They also need to tell us which contractors they will throw out of work in their much heralded programme of cuts

We all must remember we are elected to serve (and provide services to) the people of Somerset. Less than half the people in Somerset turned out to vote and of these less than half of those voted this administration into power (46.2%) and yet we will all be paying the price!

All councils face severe financial problems in the current climate but the Conservatives need to stop falsifying the figures in order to blame the Liberal Democrats. Somerset is currently a 4 Star Council let's see how quickly the stars drop under attack from the Conservatives."

. The whole text of the quote used at the beginning can be found at: http://www.somersetlibdems.org.uk/pages/Fact-not-Fiction.html