Following my question at today’s Corporate Issues Scrutiny the Labour-run County Council has had to admit to an “embarassing” miscalculation of the costs of Local Government review and its pension liabilities.

The Council under-estimated the pension liabilities following the merging of the district and country councils meaning it now has to find £1.85 million pounds extra every year into the future. To put it into perspective last year the Council scrapped free transport for all over 16’s to get to school and college. (£2.3m). This would have gone a long long way towards paying for that. But it does beg the question – is there anything else out there they are not telling us.

Well we then found out that senior management positions in finance are being cut as part of cost savings and that there will be no impact on delivery of the service. These positions costing over £500,000 over the last 3 years are apparently not now needed – begs the question why did we reorganise a department to save money three years ago and include positions which were not needed!

Answer – perhaps Labour failed to properly manage local government reorganisation.

We also found out that the Council has to find an additional £180,000 for additional energy costs for community buildings.  I thought that this was because of the delays they have had in their closure program, but it turns out its because they didn’t know about the bills, or the buildings, or what they were being charged or which department was paying the bills or something like that – didn’t really get to the bottom of that one, but I do know that that money would more than pay for the costs of repairs and maintenance to get Fram Community Centre into a great condition.