Over the past few days, I have been going to a number of strategy meetings for the Council, and it has struck me that our policies are based on a number of premises that we have not fully articulated. I thought it might be good for me to summarise them:
1) We have decided to value Brent staff. This is partly down to principle and partly pragmatism. The principle is that, as a Labour administration, we think our staff are entitled to certain pay and conditions, and those should not be lowered simply because an employer faces financial difficulty. Of course, we have deleted a vast number of posts as we need to balance the books, but we are not going down the road of some authorities of sacking all the staff and offering them jobs back only if they take a much lower salary. The pragmatic part of that decision is that we want to run good services, and that can only be done by well motivated staff.
2) That relates to the second principle: whatever we do, we want to do well. Thus we have rejected suggestions that the quality of service should be downgraded. Instead we are coping with the financial constraints by doing things more efficiently, or by deciding not to do them.
3) We are working on the correct assumption that the drastically reduced resources available tio the Council are here for the foreseeable future. Although I wish it were otherwise, the self interest of the Lib Dems and Tories is likely to manacle them together until 2015. Assuming Labour wins then, the government will no longer be ideologically committed to shrinking the state, but I don't expect a vast flow of resources to local government.
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