A political row over next year's West Midlands Police budget bore all the hallmarks of the proverbial two bald men fighting over a comb.
Labour Police Commissioner Bob Jones had to persuade a group of politicians from across the West Midlands not to veto his plans for a three per cent rise in the police precept on council tax.
Now that the Government has decided that the top council tax rise before a referendum is two per cent, this increase to the force’s budget seems doomed.
Bearing in mind the Government grant covers almost £500 million of the constabulary’s £560 million annual budget there is very little dependence on the council tax income anyway.
So the 643,000 West Midlands households are currently billed an average £102.43 a year for policing and Mr Jones wanted this to rise to £105.50 – which, although an inflation busting three per cent increase, amounts to about 6p a week he argued.
But Conservative councillors on the crime panel, Birmingham’s Deirdre Alden and Solihull’s Ken Meeson argued that this would impact on ‘hard pressed families’ and the Commissioner should find the money elsewhere – perhaps in the reserves which the force treasurer had already admitted are ‘embarrassingly high’.
Coun Alden argued for a modest 1.5 per cent increase, so that’s 3p per week, and using £900,000 from the reserves to plug the gap.
Setting aside that it is rarely advised to use cash reserves to fund revenue spending, Bob pointed out the £150 million reserves are already earmarked for various things including redundancy and equal pay, capital spending, contingencies – such as riots – and that he plans to spend about £60 million on a recruitment and training drive. The money is clearing buring a hole in their collective pockets.
The argument was effectively over an extra £1.50 a year for every household and the two rebels were voted down and Bob’s budget approved.
This row has been be rendered even more pointless now Local Government Secretary Eric Pickles has had his say.
His department has now informed local authorities the trigger level for a council tax referendum is two per cent.
Given the cost of a referendum and the generally held view that the public would not vote to pay more it amounts to a cap.
So the three per cent was only confirmed on condition Mr Pickles allows it. Now he hasn’t it’s back to the drawing board for the police budget.
The alternative to accepting the ‘cap’ is even more pointless – a region wide referendum over a £3 per year increase. (A sensible approach would be to only allow a referendum over the total council tax bill, rather than the police, fire, parish council or Centro precepts in isolation).
Bob is of course confident he would win such a referendum, after all, in a public budget consultation survey carried out by West Midlands Police an impressive 85 per cent of people replied that they would support an increase of three per cent or more.
The only snag is that approximately 60 per cent of responses to the online survey came from police computers – ie were officers or staff supporting increases in their own budget.
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Things are getting bitter in Kingstanding where there is the small matter of a council by-election next Thursday.
Local Tory boy Gary Sambrook is pushing his local credentials to everyone, and even had a decent tribute song, Vote Gary, written by a local guitar duo with lyrics based on one of his many In Touch leaflets.
So far that has been the high point of the campaign which is otherwise been rife with unpleasantness and mud-slinging. Young Mr Sambrook’s campaign style provokes considerable anger in Labour quarters.
Labour supporters, despite trying to present a ‘positive campaign’, are suggesting there could be complaints about the accuracy of Tory leaflets and are whispering to all that Mr Sambrook is so committed locally that he has tried to secure safe Tory seats elsewhere in the city. But this resentment hit the public arena courtesy of local Labour grandee Hugh McCallion, who, as a former chairman of the housing committee, used to spar with Edwina Currie when she was cutting her political teeth Birmingham City Council.
Mr McCallion, whose acerbic tweets often take the form of poetry, sent out a delightful rhyming couplet which ended with ‘let’s shaft the little runt!’.
Queue faux outrage from the Tories who filled my twitter timeline with comments about how unsporting this all is.
A Labour Party source said that they would be sending Hugh a copy of the party’s social media policy. “Gary Sambrook’s song is no Things Can Only Get Better, and Hugh McCallion is no WH Auden,” he added. Mr McCallion said the runt in question is Ian Duncan Smith and followed a series of comments on benefits policy.
The good news is that there is only seven days of this stuff left, the bad news is that it begins again in a few weeks.
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Minutes from last month’s council meeting were approved without comment but I am told (since they are not immediately published) there was one glaring mistake.
A question from a member of the public talked of ‘low morals’ among cuts ravaged council staff. Perhaps the author was trying to say ‘low morale’.
