Dear Sir,
As promised to the councillors at the count for the election, I would be holding them all to account, and now we have a proper piece of decision making to scrutinise up at county!
Last week there was a welcome pledge from the Condem coalition up at County Hall that they are ‘providing an extra £10,000 for every County Councillor to invest in their communities’ but if you look at the detail, we have a true to form Condem pledge.
The focus here should be on the extra, which it is not. It is a cut of £1,260,000 from the ‘Towns & Villages regeneration fund’ allocated by Labour, including the budgets of the Area Action Partnerships, including our own, Great Aycliffe & Middridge Partnership.
The councillors and the public make up the board of the AAP and decide together, in cooperation, where the funding is allocated. Now it will just be the councillors deciding where the money goes.
I think everyone would have welcomed extra but the reality of this is, it is just shuffling about, cutting the budget of one to give to another.
Simon Hocking