What will the Conservatives do for me?


If we win the election on 4th June we promise that we will immediately:-


Reinstate over £1m of Labour?s cuts in front line services, including ?
£250,000 in care homes for the elderly
£150,000 in respite care for disabled children
£100,000 in the Library service
£40,000 in salting and gritting the roads in winter
£100,000 in staff training
£197,000 subsidies to local and rural bus services
£100,000 in street light inspections
£65,000 in lighting the M65
Add £9m to the budget for repairing roads and footpaths
Add £5m to the Children?s Fund to protect children at risk and to improve the life chances of ?looked after children? (ie children in the care of LCC)
Add £1m to the budget to give grants to Voluntary and Faith bodies to help them adapt their premises for use by young people
Appoint 3 extra Trading Standards Officers to tackle sales of alcohol to underage young people and to fight the activities of loan sharks
Increase the frequency of gully cleaning
Add two extra PCSOs to Labour?s proposal of 10 to make sure that every District gets an extra PCSO (NB Labour will not say which Districts will not receive an extra PCSO under their proposal ? it could be your District!)
Use the £11m in the bank accounts of Lancashire County Developments Limited (LCDL) to provide short term finance to those companies that are commercially sound but are having difficulty getting bank loans in the current economic climate

And we will freeze the Council Tax in 2010/2011

How will you achieve this?

We will do exactly what everyone in Lancashire has to do, that is to sort out what the real priorities are and concentrate our resources in those areas rather than slavishly following Government dictats and politically correct issues. For example, we will immediately:

(i) reduce the number of issues of ?Vision? to 2 each year, saving £250,000
(ii) cut the remaining budget for publications by half saving a further £250,000
(iii) freeze appointments to all vacancies except those in key ?front line? services saving £1.4m. (NB This figure is calculated by assuming that only 1 in 5 vacant posts will be frozen)
(iv) charge the cost of the newly created post of Director of Development to LCDL saving £100,000
(v) cut the cost of the so called ?equal pay review? from 5% to 4%, saving £8m.
(vi) change the way the Council funds its budgets whereby Labour use ?one off? unforeseen savings (such as reductions in interest rates) to finance major expenditure items without considering the impact on current and future years? budgets. Our proposal has the support of the Council?s Finance Officers and would save over £30m immediately. It would also make better use of the Council?s reserves (about £500m) and avoid another Icelandic fiasco where £10m is at risk because, in effect, we would be ?lending to ourselves?.

For the future, we would undertake a fundamental policy review to ensure that the County Council is concentrating its resources in providing the key services that the people of Lancashire want ie:-
Properly maintained roads and footpaths
Better care for vulnerable children
Better and more dignified care for our elderly and disabled citizens
Better facilities for our young people
Tackling crime and anti social behaviour

If this review only resulted in a 5% reduction in costs, the total saving to the people of Lancashire would be £35m every year.