Wednesday 4 March 2015

Reasonable and necessary priorities?


Last week, amongst the budget proposals, the council approved over £200,000 in cuts to services for children with special educational needs or disabilities.
The budget was pushed through by officers and approved by the Labour and the Independents at last week's meeting.

The reality is illustrated by an article in this week's Carmarthen Journal concerning the Myrddin Children's Special and Autistic Unit in Carmarthen. The unit will see it's council funding of £39,000 cut by £18,000, nearly half of it.

Last October, Leader of the council Kevin Madge said that the payment of nearly £27,000 to Tim Kerr QC to defend (unsuccessfully) the unlawful payments received by the chief executive, Mark James, were "reasonable and necessary".

I guess it all depends on your priorities as to what constitutes 'reasonable and necessary'....

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

When are the next local elections Mr.Madge so that I know where not to put my x

Anonymous said...

When will people realise that Carmarthenshire's 'budgeting' process is no more than asking all services to find a similar amount of 'cuts' . There is no place for priorities within that dictat, no scrutiny of where and how existing resources are spent, no scrutiny of available reserves etc and certainly no debate/consultation on how to link strategic priorities with available finance or a root and branch review of the senior management structure etc
Priorities - what priorities. Once more where are the politicians ?

Anonymous said...

You will notice that in all these cuts that are backed by the ruling "junta" in CCC, that there is no mention of any cuts to the generous expenses and allowances (in many cases totally unjustified) paid to our councillors, many of whom have proved there ineffectiveness over the years at protecting the interests of those they are supposed to represent - but rarely do!