3.9% and the Lost £6m

[steveL]

There will come a point when council tax has to start rising again but with irresponsible spending still going on to the extent that it is then it's hard to argue that we have already reached that point. I think we all know that the same sort of spending will continue because of the people we are dealing with and the fact that such people find spending money a lot more fun than managing it. We have a WONGA council, a 'Buy Now Pay Later' Council - the sort that would even buy a tin shed if offered a no interest credit deal.

Let's face it - too many of them are just plain THICK.

[Foggy]

In my opinion people who are in charge of making the kind of decisions a council makes should have to demonstrate or prove their ability and competence to carry out the role before even standing to be elected.  Although, I realise this is an 'ideal world' scenario and would never happen.  Then again, are the people who vote for them the stupid ones for electing people who are clearly not up to the job?

Regarding the register if interests, I guess like a lot of things with our council, information is 'declared' and there is no system in place to verify that the information is correct.  Where is the additional evidence to back up the information provided?  I have often questioned if everything that should be declared on these forms has been declared. The answer is probably not, particularly in the case of one person who lives in a very big house and apparently has no 'real' job.

[steveL]

Consider OFCA. According to the register of interests, Cranney has nothing to do with OFCA now. He used to put himself down as 'Funding Advisor' but even that has disappeared since they gave him the Chair of Regeneration. The reality is that his wife works there, several family members sit on the board of OFCA as do the motley pair Sant and Gidney who have sat as fellow directors of God knows how many of Cranney's 26 companies.

Cranney's method is to control by proxy.

[Land Phil]

I was litening to a radio program about politics in Iran.

To stand you have to hold academic qualifications or alternatively take an exam as part of your application.

Sounds like a good idea to me.

[Foggy]

Sounds like a good idea to me.  There needs to be some sort of screening process before we let people decide how to spend millions of tax payers money.  If it's not an exam or academic qualifications then it should be proven stable and successful employment experience along with the appropriate skills and qualities.

People who could string a sentence together would be an improvement on some of our current lot.

[for fawkes sake]

An excellent article and the kind we will never likely see in the town's so called Newspaper. It shows very clearly that both a person's wealth and an organisation's wealth are dependent on two things: incomings and outgoings. Both are equally important and the article shows just how little control the council exerts on its outgoings. Spend, spend, spend is a very apt description.

I would like to add one more to an already depressing list of waste. Hartlepool has one of the lowest rates of occupancy of business premises in the country. In Middleton Grange alone, there are over 30 empty units and yet think of how little effort or imagination has been put in by the local council to change this. It would be interesting to see how much in business rates the council misses out on by not seriously tackling this problem.

This is going to be a real issue in the near future as the Government has decided to make changes to the business rates system which will see local councils limited to only keeping the local business rates raised. There will be no favourable adjustment made at Government level, as happens now  - not good news if you don't have many businesses.

[steveL]

anyone remember the Portas £100,000 to relaunch the high street? If I remember rightly, our £100,000 went on putting up some garden sheds in Church Square for a few days. Clueless.