Liverpool will be a grim year for Liverpool taxpayers and will see a reduced number of staff working for the Council. However, we might have bottomed out the problems and the Eurovision Song Contest will give us the chance to market our City to the World.
As I look ahead to 2023, I see far more pain than gain in Liverpool. Some of that pain is being caused by the Government and will affect everyone but much of that pain is Liverpool’s alone following 12 years of dithering and incompetence or perhaps even worse!
Charges have now been laid against 4 people including 3 former employees of Liverpool council and a Tory politician from Lancashire as a result of Operation Sheridan. This case looked at problems surrounding Liverpool Direct Limited and One Call Lancashire and seems to have cost taxpayers in those areas plenty. Perhaps justice will be done in those cases 8 long years after the Police first intervened.
I am optimistic but not confident that charges will be laid against 12 people in connection with the Operation Aloft review of Liverpool Council. I was optimistic that things might be in train when a 12th arrest was made in the autumn but we shall have to wait and see whether the huge problems that have made Liverpool the worst council in the Country will end up in an assessment that it was caused by incompetence, illegality or both.
March 1st will be a key date for the long-suffering taxpayers of the City. The Council is looking for £73 million of cuts or tax and charges increases. This is about 15% of our gross budget and will be painful indeed. Much will be made by some people of two things. Members of the Labour Party will say that it is all the fault of the Government (abetted by the dastardly Liberal Democrats) Well there has been no Lib Dem participation in Government taxation since 2014. Every northern city has been treated in exactly the same awful way by the Tories but only Liverpool has 5 Government Commissioners in it and ahs lost a minimum of £165 million through waste incompetence or corruption of its systems.
Another group of people will say it has all been pinched or looted by corrupt officers and politicians. That is not true. Most of the problem has been caused by the fact that the Council for more than a decade took its eye of the ball of basic things that needed to be done. Some of that incompetence continues to this day. As an example, Andrew & Liz Makinson and I agreed as ward councillors for Beechley House on Harthill Road to be sold for housing in September 2021. That has not happened. Instead, it has been repeatedly vandalised and left to decay and is a declining asset. We could have had £1,250,000 for that asset which could have been used for other capital purposes. Instead, it has been a continuing cost to us.
The biggest problems relate to failure to think through the social services needs of some of our residents with the biggest problems. When I tell people that the biggest items of expenditure for our Council are children’s and adult social services which together account for 68% of our net budget they are amazed. There have been huge increases in demand for these services caused by a number of factors all of which were foreseeable with one exception Covid. All these factors have affected every council in the UK, if not the world.
Other councils have dealt with this by thinking ahead and understanding what could be done to prevent problems becoming acute. As an example, they have spent more on keeping people who are getting older fit which reduces the call on social and health services. They have planned ahead to get people out of hospital quickly and back into their own home if they have had to go there. These ways of doing things are what people want. Who wants to be in hospital?! They also have the advantage of being cheaper, so it really is a win, win situation.
We now have in place a Director of Adult Services and a Director of Children’s Services who understand all this but in the short term they will be required to make cuts in advance of being able to push through the changes that are needed to make things better.
We have no housing policy and are only now putting in place a Housing Director to help us create one. In the meantime, there is little cooperation between the Council and housing associations and a lax planning policy has allowed shoddy developers to put up rubbish, especially around our City Centre, which will not have a long life. Fortunately, we are getting some better developers into the City now but we have no strategy for ensuring that old housing stock is either renovated or replaced and that new housing goes onto the many good sites in the City Centre and the area around it.
The upshot of all this is that Council tax will go up by 5% while services will decline and our ability to provide services and support to some of our most needy citizens will decline. It is likely that schools and the Fire Service will not be supported with cash for the mess that the Council made in procuring electricity earlier in the year.
There are good things happening. Liverpool has the worst collection rate for both council tax and business rates. Officers and the Commissioners have agreed that this is priority where people who will not pay their tax are made to pay it whilst people who cannot pay their tax are supported.
Systems are improving. Cllr Kris Brown is doing a really excellent job as chair of Audit to ensure that our money is spent properly, and systems are in place to help us spend money properly and transparently. I have been working as Chair of Performance Review to ensure that both officers and councillors have systems in place to know how we are performing, measuring our performance against other councillors and looking at the areas where there is most need for performance improvement.
Liverpool will be the centre of world attention for the right reasons in May when we act as hosts of the Eurovision Song Competition as proxies for the Ukraine who would have held it in our sister City, Odessa. This has already ensured a £30 million stimulation of our economy but in the long-term will lead to investment in our City based on the increased exposure that we will receive.
Perhaps the biggest hope of all for Liverpool lies in the fact that we have all up elections to the Council at the start of May. My Liberal Democrat team and I are running the biggest campaign that we have been able to run for years. We have delivered more leaflets and knocked on more doors in more areas than we have been able to do since 2010 and the Labour Party seem to have largely retreated from our core areas like the current Church Ward which enables us to do even more in marginal wards.
I will not predict the result other than to say That Liberal Democrats will make good gains from Labour whilst the other opposition parties in the City will either fail to advance or decline.
Whatever happens to us collectively or individually next year we will survive and come through this stronger because of the infectious spirit of mutual concern and mutual support which runs through the DNA of every true Scouser.
So, from all the Liverpool Liberal Democrat Team best wishes and good fortunes for 2023 especially for the people of Liverpool but also for you wherever you live in our global and mutually dependent world.
But what does Richard Kemp think? 