Local organisations set to benefit (From Bromsgrove Advertiser)
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Local organisations set to benefit
12:50pm Saturday 16th March 2013 in News
County council leader Adrian Hardman
ORGANISATIONS in Worcestershire stand to benefit the most from controversial plans to farm out council services, bosses have said.
The county council says it will make every effort to ensure it carries on spending most of its cash locally after figures revealed 77 per cent of the authority’s £330 million yearly spend stays in Worcestershire.
County Hall has plans to shrink 40 per cent by 2017 by handing over services to external providers.
It says most contracts up for grabs will be handed to county organisations, keeping as much cash as possible in Worcestershire.
The move, first reported in January, includes 650 new job losses on top of the 856 already being scrapped.
Councillor Adrian Hardman, speaking during a recent meeting of the Conservative cabinet, said: “We are looking to reduce our spend by around £20 million a year, partly as a result of increasing demands on certain services and partly because we’re expecting to receive less funding from central Government.
“Work is well underway to plan ahead for the future years in many areas, including reducing our assets and partnership working.”
A new report, which was backed by the cabinet, says local suppliers will be encouraged to take on more work so less of it is done in-house.
County councillor for Redditch David Thain, the cabinet member for transformation and change, said: “The important thing this demonstrates is that we are fiscally responsible, which means we have not needed to put up council tax this year.
“We are proud of our financial approach.”
Lew Smoralz says...
1:53pm Sun 17 Mar 13
Before that, councils collected tax, managed whatever duties that national government assigned to them, such as locally managing driving licences, and then tendered local firms for whatever jobs were needed doing. It has been a reckless empire-building process.
I don't like the Conservative party, but I cannot argue with this approach which will ensure that taxpayers do not keep subsidising the expensive bloated approach.