NTC Service Budget Options

[Simon Kirby]

Up for review at tonight's Community Service Committee is the NTC Service Budget.

There's the usual casual dishonesty about inflation rates. The allotment rent is now set 12 months in advance (the Council now recognise that this is the right thing to do), and the council are proposing to increase the rent "in line with a projected inflation for 2016/17" of 3.0%. They don't say where they got that projection from so I'm guessing they just made it up because the Bank of England's best estimate is that CPI inflation will stand at around 1.2% this time next year. This is a inventive way of getting around the problem they had last year when they lied about the current inflation rate, as now they still get to set the increase "in line with inflation", but they get to choose what that inflation figure is.

One of the real stinkers in this year's budget is the doubling of the market management fee from £6,000 annually to £12,000. There's no explanation for why the management cost is doubling. This fee is the money they give to one of the market traders to supervise the market on market day, and it is in addition to the £17.5k of service team staff costs. That's a lot of administration for a market that runs twice a week. The gross cost of running the market is £104k which includes all of the administration staff and back-office overheads, and with a rental income of £58,000 the cost to the tax-payer of providing the market was this year £46k, so that's likely to hit £50k next year.

The standout problem for the council is the cost of their office accommodation. They've been particularly rubbish at leasing rooms in their rambling Gothic mansion and this one item has added £10k to their budgeted town hall costs, and this puts the cost of their office accommodation at around £70k annually. You can rent an awful lot of decent office accommodation around Newbury to £70k. It wouldn't be so imposing, but it would save around 5% of the precept if the Council simply gave up the old town hall and took a couple of offices on the Greenham Business Park.