Trafford awaits its provisional financial settlement
Might even be today, but more likely tomorrow or Thursday.
This is the week where councils learn the amount that central government is going to top up their funding.
We know the general rules that are going to apply. We know that the Government wants to support councils with high levels of deprivation.
Last year Trafford had to apply for exceptional financial support which allowed the council to increase council tax beyond the normal capping of 4.99% and it provided the ability to borrow up to £9.6m to support the council’s in year budget.
The council are currently anticipating a modest underspend of about £0.5m on this year’s budget. That would allow either reducing that £9.6m capitalisation for the year; or a small boost to the reserves.
If it’s feasible, I’d prefer supplementing the reserves. In my view, they’re far too low.
A favourable settlement from government will help narrow the funding gap. If it’s unfavourable, it presents some difficult choices.
The Institute for Financial Studies (IFS) put out some analysis of the government’s budget approach for local government last month and it’s hard to see Trafford being one of the winners. Most of the policy shifts seem to work against Trafford, so it’s definitely a worrying wait but we’ll see.
Treasury Management Report (A quietly well-performing aspect of the Council. Regardless of political complexion, this team is tasked with managing both our debts and financial assets)
I did as I was told. I kept my mouth shut as instructed. I voted as whipped.
Ultimately, it was a mix of posturing and moral scolding. The more we are removed from the neighbourhoods we represent, the more we inhabit an alternate universe. Nobody wins and you won’t hear of these motions again. It’s just hierarchies reinforcing themselves. The people sat on the council dais win. That is all.
We’ve got to find new ways of highlighting serious issues.
Council Finances
The period from October to December is typically the time when the next year’s budget comes together. Assumptions are made about the Government’s settlement and other unknowns such as pay settlements.
I notice my old friend, former Councillor Jonathan Coupe, has been raising the absence of a draft budget.
Screenshot
I was scheduled to be a member of a scrutiny committee from late summer. It never met and meetings scheduled for December have now been cancelled. Jonathan is right to question where we are.
I think this tells you how much depends on the final Local Government Settlement. We are never given the actual date, but it was the 18th December, which triggered our application for Exceptional Financial Support from the Government in 2024. Given that £9.6m of that financial support was not consolidated, but was actually a borrowing facility that will have to be paid back over time, I would have preferred a worst case budget for 2026/27. I hope the Government understands the financial precipice I suspect we’re standing over.
The monitoring report for the current year is to be presented at tonight’s executive. It looks like we’re on course to spend that £9.6m capitalisation. All things being equal, that would leave us needing to make up that £9.6m just to stand still without any increases in costs.
The government has recently published its fair funding review. We won’t know the full impact until the settlement is published, but prioritising support for the most deprived councils won’t necessarily help Trafford.
Executive Meeting 8th December
Apart from the current in-year budget position there’s a couple of other items on the agenda;
Potential compulsory purchase New Street Altrincham – L&Q have a development there.
Memorandum of Understanding with L&Q on future working collaboration
I would have preferred this memorandum of understanding to have undergone pre-decision scrutiny. Were L&Q working collaboratively when they emptied Circle Court?
Activation of Trafford’s Cultural Strategy – go ahead for Trafford Is… platform
Urmston Plan – all councils do this type of thing and you’re left feeling wouldn’t it have been better to just do some implementation. We knew that the Urmston Market site was frustrating residents. Has this ‘plan’ brought about any resolution?
Advanced Manufacturing Skills Programme – our contribution to a GM wide programme.
Planning Committee applications
None within the ward, but Stretford Town Centre is important to many of our residents. This will be heard on Thursday evening.
Lacy Street – Residential development (use class C3) of 53 dwellings with associated amenity space, access, car and cycle parking, external landscaping, drainage and other associated works.
The recommendation is for members of the committee to grant this application from Trafford Council. I’m on record as opposing it as an unsuitable use of this prime location.
It’s hard to imagine a less walking/cycling friendly junction. Just as the Urmston plan is advocating raised crossings, Stretford proposes fast corners to the junctions in the centre of Stretford. Front doors and gardens onto Chester Road are brave at best.
Council has been cancelling meetings during by-elections. They’ve always done it. It’s always been a problem, but we’ve worked around it. Having two consecutive by-elections has broken the system in my view, we’ve had no budget scrutiny, we’ve a huge backlog in performance reports. I have tried to identify the constitutional basis for this suspension. I’ve looked at the government advice and LGA. The advice is actually to carry on business as normal. So there’s no basis for this suspension. I tried to raise this as a point of order.
I was not allowed to raise an unconstitutional act as unconstitutional, since the act wasn’t in the constitution. My head is spinning.
Davyhulme Sewage Works is a fascinating place. I was one of three Trafford councillors to take up a guided tour provided by United Utilities. It’s a place I’ve always been aware of; famously because of its smells, but also because of the space it takes up alongside the ship canal. As a youngster I used to cycle over to Barton Airport to watch the planes and we’d take short-cuts over water courses and outflows to get to the locks. It’s a huge site.
The pong associated with the sewage works has noticeably receded. I’m not going to pretend it’s a become a canal-side idyll, but there’s no doubt there’s been significant improvement. It was also apparent that the technology is also improving even if the basic infrastructure still has components of the original 1894 works.
Davyhulme is long associated with technological innovation and we really don’t give enough attention to the development here in 1914. Searching the web just throws up the odd burst of enthusiastic exaltation popping up anywhere in the world.
Examples from the web
En 1914, les chercheurs anglais Ardern et Lockett découvrent que la dépollution est beaucoup plus rapide lorsque l’eau usée à traiter est mise en contact avec une biomasse épuratrice [4] déjà formée. Ils déposent ainsi le premier brevet sur le procédé d’épuration qui sera dénommé procédé à boues activées.
A Call for Recognition of Ardern and Lockett in Trafford
How did we come to miss celebrating the centenary in 2014? Ardern and Lockett are celebrated by sewage engineers all over the world. Why no statues, no streets named after them? Are we ashamed of poo?
Where are we now?
The process Ardern and Lockett developed is still in use all over the world. The demand on it has never been greater. Of course it’s been improved and there are new investments coming through.
Davyhulme wastewater treatment works is set to undergo an initial investment of around £350m over the next five years to ensure it meets the needs of a growing population and higher environmental standards that will improve water quality in the Manchester Ship Canal.
Clearly, I welcome this investment. However, it is long overdue.
I don’t believe that water should be privatised. It is to the everlasting shame of the Conservative Party that we allowed our infrastructure to deteriorate to such an extent that processes I’m so proud of at Davyhulme and each and every other treatment works have to by-passed when the capacity can’t cope with sewage discharged directly into the rivers and canals.
We are where we are and whilst I abhor the use of rivers, I’ve got to recognise that the infrastructure that first receives the rain water as it comes down on us in ever increasing downpours is under the council control.
We’ve got to keep our drains and sewers clear. We’ve got to encourage each other to respect the drains and toilet flushes. Wipes should never go down the loo. Even if the manufacturers claim their product to be bio-degradable, the wipes never degrade quick enough not to contribute to the giant fat-balls that block the sewars. And even when the wipes make it through the system, they’ve still got to be removed and taken to landfill.
Mea Culpa
It’s not just wet wipes. I might not be guilty of disposing of those in the system, but I saw the amount of grit and small pebbles that make it through to Davyhulme, which is but a small proportion of the amount building up in our drains.
It was impossible to avoid thinking of ‘Stretford Beach’ and the amount of pebbles building up from there in the drains. Should we ever be using pebble and grit in ways that it’s impossible to avoid large amounts entering the drains?
Let’s keep the drains flowing.
Finally,
Strongly recommend a visit to Davyhulme Sewage Works. It’s absolutely fascinating.
Edward Ardern smoking and William Lockett sat front right (photographer unknown)
Fierce Winds Conspire, The Dark clouds Do Gather……
There are times when, a good report with confirmation that you are doing everything that you should do, is the last thing you want to hear. The storm is coming still.
We’ve actually had two reports on the council’s sustainability, one following the other. Neither of the two reports provides a route to delivering council services at a level the public aspires to.
The second of these, our Corporate Peer Challenge, from the Local Government Association is stark reading, but it does little beyond telling us that we’re right to be concerned.
The earlier report from the Chartered Institute of Public Finance and Accountancy (CIPFA) is the one that’s providing the action plan that came to Accounts and Audit Committee this week.
There’s a danger that the issues are seen as temporary problems of liquidity that the government could solve. There’s a sense that we’re a special case and it’s nothing the public should worry about; we just need Government to listen. I worry that we’re internalising problems that we won’t solve without the public owning both the problems and the solutions.
The public has an expectation that our parks and streets should be maintained to a much better standard than the council even dreams about. They do understand that not enough is being spent on them. They therefore have an expectation that if council tax rises, they will see an improvement. The very fact that we’re unable to meet that expectation is proof that the system is broken.
I think the latest pronouncements from Government on future local government spending suggests that any hope of special treatment for Trafford has now receded. We’re going to have to deal with this.
How do we balance the cost of funding statutory provision in child and adult care with delivering our everyday environmental services? Can we corral those everyday services so that they are directly commissioned by communities and not subjected to competing pressures in social care? How does community wealth building thrive in the current environment?
Ideally, we can work with the combined authority and Mayor Andy Burnham. However, the risk is that the Government’s targeting of funding puts us on a different trajectory to most of our Greater Manchester colleague councils. That risk only emphasises the fact that communities are the only allies still irrevocably facing the coming storm with us.
We must not fall into myopic thinking that balancing the books will be the only test that the public places on us. More than anything they judge us on the state of their neighbourhood. If we can’t insulate spending on neighbourhoods within the council’s spend, I think we ought to be considering alternative models. It may be time for parish councils and/or area boards to come of age.
Photo by Eg Civic Ferio from Pexels: https://www.pexels.com/photo/sea-under-a-storm-cloud-18608634/
A notable scrutiny meeting took place on the 12th March looking at some of the issues that most exercise residents:
How highway interventions such as crossings, yellow lines etc. are prioritised
Pothole repairs and pavement maintenance
Leaf and Gully Clearance
Preventing Accidents
It was the Scrutiny Committee’s attempt at clarity and transparency in the prioritisation of interventions on a limited budget. I think the scrutiny committee made some progress.
There was considerable focus from the committee on why certain projects get to the top of the list and others are held back. The example pursued by the committee was ‘double yellow lines’, something that requires a traffic regulation order (TRO). The presentation included a couple of matrices (shown above), but the officers hadn’t submitted all of them and they promised to follow up by submitting the TRO matrix.
Even without the relevant matrix I think we can get a picture of how proposals are scored. But then it got slightly more complicated.
Sometimes opportunities arose to attach the job to another funding stream (examples included Active Travel and the Sale West and Altrincham Network Infrastructure project (Swani)). This could work both ways, bringing forward some projects but holding back others where a cross benefit project might be ‘anticipated’.
Finance – I’m hoping they score cost v benefit in all cases, but the nature of yearly budgeting means it is sometimes only possible to do smaller works
There followed a degree of interogation on whether other interventions could push a project up to the top of the list, a senior councillor’s intervention or a popular petition heard in council.
Overall on Traffic Matrices
Essentially, we’re arguing over crumbs. The allocated budgets are so small that it’s hard to see some worthwhile schemes ever happening. We ought to have transparency regardless of the budget. These decisions are far less complex than officers and lead councillors protest. I don’t have a problem that political imperative might play a part in decisions as long as we can see that it has been applied.
The public are seeing comparatively vast amounts put into active travel. Whilst that is an entirely separate budget, I think the public want to see objectivity and prudence applied to those schemes too.
I would like to see all the various matrices and projects published on the council’s website. We’re going to have seek solutions to this growing backlog of work and the more we can be upfront about it, the better.
Two thirds of our footpaths are functionally impaired
Footways v Highways
“Footways are obviously a big priority for us, but we have to first and foremost , go with the safety issue and where we can have the most impact on safety. So, the fast majority goes on the ABC network and not on the U class network.” – Chris Morris
Generally, this is fair. If it was just four-wheeled motor vehicles, I could argue that damaged urban roads reduce speed and improve safety, but the effect of a pothole on two-wheeled vehicles can have fatal repercussions.
Nevertheless, our footways are in an unacceptable condition. This is a critical element of our activity supporting infrastructure that’s unusable for a lot of people and it’s getting worse.
Pothole repairs
My colleague, Cllr Simon Thomas, raised the quality of pothole repairs. He said he was astounded that we were not sealing the potholes and argued that we should also cutting the hole square for a better fix.
I’m not sure I understand the response from officers in terms of the specific question, but I do get that the underlying condition of the road is the primary concern of the road engineers since the pothole is only the visible manifestation of a larger condition deterioration. That said, if pothole repairs are disintegrating within a short space of time, we need to know.
Vision Zero / Road Safety
Greater Manchester has talked a good talk on reducing serious injury on our roads, but I really haven’t seen proactive responses. I thought the most interesting comment was that Trafford officers described the Vision Zero team as being ‘resourced’ (as Trafford sees when they regularly meet). My take is that we need to see output from ‘Vision Zero.
I’ve only skimmed the surface of the information submitted to Scrutiny Committee, but I’ve tried to pick out the key elements that are of concern to residents. It’s well worth watching the whole exchange. By all means add your comments below and I’ll try and respond.
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