One of the commenters on this post asks about the green zones and the deletion of two Environmental posts. Why were they cut earlier this year? It is a fair question.
The two environmental posts were earmarked as a result of the "Improvement and Efficiency Plan" set in motion under the previous administration, which of course set this year's budget. This was a scheme to get rid of a tenth of Council employees, with a preference for deleting vacant posts, encouraging early retirement and so on. The work of those posts has now been reassigned within the same unit.
However, as I emphasised to Brent FoE when I visited on Tuesday, there are large numbers of Council employees promoting environmental policies even though they are not called "environmental". For instance, all our transport policies are geared to increasing sustainability. Our planning department promotes renewable energy, better insulation and so on through the Planning process. However, it can also affect less obvious sectors like IT, or the Children & Families department.
The reason for the green zones cut was linked to the way green zones were funded. Green Zones were funded from the Performance Reward grant, which was one of those the new government decided to cut part way through the year. In year cuts, which have not happened since the bad old days of the 1990s as far as I know, force the Council to make immediate savings. Since they generally apply to staff costs, they usually involve redundancy costs and other items that take time to implement. In fact, Brent Council had already spent the money which the government had allocated to us, since it was assumed to be reliable. We are currently looking at a possible £5.5 million overspend which has been signficantly increased by the sudden withdrawal of £5.3 million in central government funding that we thought we could rely on. Hence the current clampdown on Council spending.
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