Delayed Reaction

One little gift that Paul Lorber and his outgoing colleagues were very quiet about during the election campaign was the skewing of capital spend.

Brent Council's capital spend before the election on things like roads and broken pavement was kept artifically high, at just over four million pounds this year. This was made possible by raiding the financial budgets for next year and the year after, so that (on Liberal Democrat plans) the amount spent on repairing roads and pavements will fall by about 30%. However, the fall, although engineered by the Liberal Democrats, will happen only after they have been thrown out of office, so no doubt they hope to escape the blame.