LibDems Say "Budgeting is Not An Exact Science"

At the meeting of the Executive of Sutton Council on Monday, Cllr Graham Tope spoke about the business plan for the controversial £8.5million Sutton Life Centre. As expected, the business plan was, to quote one Sutton insider, "optimistic". Bearing in mind this is only to break even, Sutton taxpayers have every reason to remain worried about the burden that they will have to carry to hide the embarrassment of the Liberal Democrat administration.

Cllr Tope explained that "budgeting is not an exact science", something that will come as news to business people up and down the country who realise that this is the polar opposite of the truth. Homeopathy is not an exact science. Budgeting, however, is a detailed appraisal of the future using case studies, market research, and an assessment of how best to use a certain amount of capital and income. Assumptions can be kept to a bare minimum by taking a pragmatic, not dogmatic view, something that does not come easily to the administration in Sutton.

The original budget for 2010-11 required £131,000 of taxpayers' money to keep the fledgling Life Centre open. The latest update shows that they will have spent £190,000 over and above this, a whopping 145% over budget. This is largely put down to an 'underachievement of income', a euphemism if ever there was one. One-off costs covered the remaining overspend. One of these costs was £40,000 for a website. Apart from the fact that this is an extraordinary amount to be spending in addition to the £208,000 Sutton Council spent on their main site, why is this an overspend? It is not beyond the wit of man to realise that a decent website would be needed to market the Centre. Why was this not included in the original budget? It is oversights like this that show why the Council believes that budgeting is not an exact science. You can't just put a wet finger in the air before undertaking a massive project like this. The business plan has more space given over to 'One Planet Living' than spreadsheets. There is nothing exact about 'One Planet Living' It really doesn't matter how many planets you need to live on if they are all bankrupt.

Since the original concept came about, the Council won a Government grant of £4million. Following this, the scheme doubled in size to fit this extra money, rather than the sensible approach of keeping this vaguely within reason. The builders were already booked to start digging the day after the council meeting which approved the decision. After even the most intransigent fan of the Centre realised that most schools realised that parents did a better job of teaching their children how to behave and so failed to book places, other activities have been brought into the Centre to justify its existence.

• Ex-offenders will come along to be told not to re offend (could the money have not been used for Job Clubs and drug rehabilitation?)
• Council meetings and other community meetings will take place at the Centre (taking important income away from schools and other community facilities)
• A Life Clinic will be set up (No, I don't know either?!)
• Some School Governors' training will be held here (threatening the future of the Glastonbury Centre that has already been saved from imminent closure once)

Nick Clegg opened the centre at an event which was mainly attended by the senior management

of Sutton Council and Liberal Democrat councillors. Half a dozen children from nearby Glenthorne School came along as guinea pigs. It would be interesting to know quite how many thousands of pounds of lost productivity it took to have the great and the good at this corporate backslapping exercise.

The Sutton Life Centre is being held up as an example of the Big Society as part of Sutton Council's status as a 'Big Society Vanguard Council'. People are struggling to understand what the Big Society concept actually is and this project pushes that understanding further away from the truth. Big Society should be about people taking back areas from the state to be under their own control. It is about people not buildings. The Sutton Life Centre is anathema to the Big Society, instead standing as a paternalistic, patronising monolith that illustrates the real centralising views of Sutton's Liberal Democrats; Power coming down from Whitehall is fine, as long as it stops at the Civic Offices, where politicians know best. That is not localism. That is not freeing individuals. That is just bringing the nanny state closer to home.

Have a look and judge for yourself if the £40k website is worth it and the £8.5million (10% of council tax collected in the entire Borough for a year) was well spent

Recession Business Fund Plundered for Controversial £8.5m Life Centre

Outraged Sutton Conservative councillors have unearthed shocking plans from the Liberal Democrat-run Council’s finance chief to plunder 70% of money from a fund set up to help local businesses in order to plough cash into the controversial £8.5million Sutton Life Centre.

Budget papers set to go before the Council’s Executive tomorrow morning (Tuesday 3 November) show plans to take £181,000 from the £256,000 ‘Local Authority Business Growth Incentive’ Grant (LABGI) to cover start-up costs for the Sutton Life Centre. If approved, the measure will leave only 29.3% (£75,000) of the fund left to spend on measures to help Sutton businesses through the recession.

The Conservative Opposition’s Finance and Value for Money Spokesman, Councillor Tim Crowley, has slammed the Lib Dems’ finance chief by calling the raid on the LABGI fund as a betrayal to local businesses favouring pet projects over helping people through the recession.

Conservatives are also voicing their concerns that despite committing over £8million of taxpayers’ money to the Life Centre, the Lib Dem administration is allowing the cost of the project to swell and to impinge on other council budgets. The plunder on LABGI is causing particular anger among Conservatives because the fund could prevent local businesses from going under thus preventing further increases to Sutton's unemployment. Official figures show that Jobseekers’ Allowance claims in Sutton have risen by 88% over the last year.

Councillor Crowley commented: “The Council’s Lib Dem finance chief is hoping to plunder a fund set up to help local businesses so he can pay for the controversial Sutton Life Centre’s start up costs, leaving only 29.3% to be spent on its original purpose.

“With the UK economy still in recession and its impact being felt in Sutton, this is an act of betrayal because the LABGI fund should only be spent on what it is intended for - helping local businesses, not propping up vanity projects. This shows contempt for business locally - if elected next year, Conservatives will never take business for granted like this.”

Pint Sized Controversial Life Centre costs £3000

Sutton’s Liberal Democrat administration is under fire for spending the equivalent of two households’ annual council tax on a pint-sized version of the controversial £8.5million Sutton Life Centre.

Hot on the tail of our Value for Money motion at Monday night’s Full Council Meeting, forensic questioning forced the project’s supremo, LibDem councillor Graham Tope, to reveal the cost of promotional material for the Sutton Life Centre. Conservative councillors and residents in the public gallery were aghast to discover that a scale model for the infamous pet project cost the taxpayer £3000.

The costly model now features in pride of place in the Civic Offices, St. Nicholas Way, ironically situated next to a new machine designed to make paying council tax easier!

The scale of the model looks like 1:100, unfortunately even at the sum of £3,000, the scale of the cost of the model is something like 1:2,800. It’s quite incredible how far the ruling Lib Dems will go to squander local taxpayers’ money. Two Band D households’ worth of council tax has paid for this scale model and we think this sends out entirely the wrong message.

In all seriousness, the model might be small but the principle is not, town hall bosses must stop treating the public purse as a plaything. When we debated value for money on Monday, our message was clear: a Conservative-run Council will cut waste, move heaven and earth to ease the burden on household budgets, and demand that every penny of council expenditure justifies itself.

This is the Conservative model for Sutton Council and all it will cost residents is a vote.

Media Coverage of the Controversial £8.5million Sutton Life Centre

ITV London came to Sutton on Wednesday to cover the story of the Sutton Life Centre. Moving swiftly on from my jauntily-angled hard hat, the parents at Brookfield School said it all, when they pointed out that if the Council are going to lavish money on safety, they would rather have a lollipop lady.

Conservative Home have published an article that I wrote, which you can read here. The Evening Standard and the Metro have also covered the pet project which is costing the equivalent of 10% of all of the Council Tax raised in a year in Sutton.

Sutton Life Centre Forced Through

Full Council last Monday turned out to be the usual bunfight but confirmed that meetings of all 54 councillors have as much influence on council decisions as Gordon Brown does on his facial muscles.

Two main items were discussed, the future of leisure provision, where the LibDems confirmed that Cheam Baths would close by 2015 and the controversial £8.5million Sutton Life Centre. Councillor Tim Crowley, Conservative Spokesman for Finance & Value for Money requested more financial details the previous Wednesday having discovered that contractors were due to start on site, the day after the decision to build was made. What was the point of pretending to make a decision when it was clear that it had already been taken. We were told that even delaying the decision may lead to Sutton Council having to pay financial penalties to the contractors. The requested information was supplied to me and Cllr Crowley at 4.10pm, less than three hours before the start of the meeting. 52 councillors had to vote on whether to spend £8.5million (astoundingly, the equivalent of 10% of all of the Council Tax raised in the Borough), without full details of the consequences of their actions.

After a 20 minute stand-off, the LibDems forced through a vote to debate the issue, without full disclosure to all councillors. Conservative councillors questioned the need for the Centre in the first place, but majored on the fact that we didn't actually have the money to build the place, instead relying on diverting money from the reserves and schools repairs budget amongst other smash and grab raids to cover the costs. It is clear that this is another case of the LibDems spending money to justify their existence. Residents were up in arms when they were asked to pay £35 for green garden waste bags. Well, guess what, you've just had your pocket picked of £44 each for a project that many will not use. Only one LibDem councillor even bothered to mention finance in the debate.

Yes, but we'll be getting spanking new community facilities won't we? - Undoubtedly; a new library that is smaller than the one that it is replacing, youth facilities to replace the youth club that was flattened to make way for the centre, a climbing wall that is more expensive that privately-run "Craggy Island" at Oaks Park and the multimedia area to teach citizenship at three times the price of the existing facilities at nearby Sutton Junior Tennis Centre. Even Vince Cable has been to Sutton to tell us that we are in the middle of the worst recession since Sean Connery found a few hairs on his pillow. However, we seem to be splashing out residents' cash whilst they are cutting back for fear of losing their jobs. The LibDems used their majority to push the thing through, supporting it to a man. The builders are on site. Work has started on the mausoleum to the LibDem's reign in Sutton.

Life Centre or Life Sentence?

A picture of an ostrich just didn't cut the mustard when writing about the latest on the controversial £8million Sutton Life Centre.

As expected, Sutton's senior LibDem councillors queued up to sing the praises of the Sutton Life Centre.

It was wonderful to have a library that would be open for longer than the one that it would replace, like the one at the Phoenix Centre in Beddington, without mentioning that many users of that library bemoan the fact that it may be open for longer but it lacks one small thing; books.

It was great that we would have a state of the art centre to teach Junior Citizenship, the silver bullet that would stop our young people getting involved in antisocial behaviour and drugs without recognising that such a course already exists in Sutton at one-third of the proposed charge per pupil.

Sometimes, even I am startled at the detachment of the LibDem administration. The Executive meeting on Monday when this was discussed was one such time. The Life Centre might just work. The 40,000 children that need to come to provide most of the income may arrive by the coachload. People may be chasing each other up the climbing wall to get their turn. Starbucks may start sending their trainee Baristas to the Sutton Life Centre to get experience as cappucino follows moccachino out of the cafe door. Kevin Costner built a baseball field in his farm when told by ghostly voices in 'Field of Dreams', "build it and they will come". He built it, they came, but it was just a film. You cannot play fast and loose with public money. It is not appropriate to say that because we have got £4million from a national grant, we need to bend over backwards to match it at a time of financial turmoil, moving money away from education, adult social services and reserves to fill the gap.

If the project falls short of its income target by 20%, the Council will have to find £95,000 each year to keep the place open. The conditions of the grant mean that if the Council sell the building or change its use in the next twenty years, we may need to pay the £4million back. Councillors always have to balance risk. We are still £5.5million light after taking a Treasury management risk in lending the money to an Icelandic bank. This is a risk too far at the wrong time. The business plan is fanciful at best. In order to find 40,000 children to turn up to pay for the building, a massive proportion of children from South East England will have to come.

According to figures contained in the business plan, there are an average of 33,900 children in each year group in schools within the target area of a 1 hour drive of Sutton. The centre is aimed at Years 6 and 8 meaning a total target market of 67,800. The centre needs 40,000 children to come which is 59% market penetration. In order to do this, the plan only allows for a paltry marketing budget of £5000 and £1300 stationery. This does not stack up well amongst organisations with a touch more experience and know-how as this list showing their percentage of their respective markets shows.

• Starbucks 16%
• Tesco 30%
• Barack Obama 53%
• BBC Radio 54%
• Apple iPod 70%
• Microsoft Windows 88%

Since, the Sutton Life Centre is pitching comfortably above the most popular man on the planet, the assumptions surely need at least a cursory second glance from someone independant and with something approaching a business brain. The G20 won't be swooping down to the Holiday Inn working how to bail us out if things go awry. Let's get it right now.

At least the Executive have had the good sense to bring the decision to a meeting of the Full Council before we did. We had our form ready to call-in the decision but it was not needed as the LibDem councillors realised that pushing this through would be one step too far.

The Full Council meeting is on Monday 27th April starting at 7pm. It is held in the Civic Offices, St Nicholas Way, Sutton, SM1 1EA. You are most welcome to come along and see where your money is going. If you use Facebook, you can add your voice by joining the group Unaffordable: Shelve the controversial £8million Sutton Life Centre! and just as importantly, please invite all of your friends to do so. If 3003 people can want Wizard man to switch the Christmas lights on in Sutton, I really hope that a few people are moved enough to try to save a few million quid of taxpayers' money. The message needs to be sent loud and clear: the public purse, filled with taxpayers' cash, should not be the plaything of politicians.

Freeze The Tax - Freeze The Life Centre

You will have received your Council Tax bill by now, showing another inflation-busting increase. Well, we tried. The only part of our bill set by a Conservative, that of the GLA precept, was frozen by Boris. George Osborne, Shadow Chancellor has pledged to give council's enough money to freeze council tax if they can peg their increases to less than 2.5%. This is a fair partnership between national and local government; you do your bit and we'll help. Meanwhile, we sought your views and shared them with the ruling administration.

We believe that Sutton could have joined the thirteen other London Boroughs that are freezing or cutting their tax, helping their residents when they need it most. You can see more on why we believe this is possible and how we could have acheived it without any frontline cuts at the website http://www.freezethetax.org.uk/.

Instead, the biggest drain on this coming year's budget, the £8million Sutton Life Centre is coming up for the go-ahead at tomorrow's meeting of the Council's Executive. £4million is coming from a grant from national taxpayers, the other £4million is coming from us directly, here in Sutton. The Council have raided the reserves, taken money originally given to Adult Social Services, delayed repairs to schools and kept unexpected windfalls that you were owed, just to shore up this pet project. I've already written about the way that planning was obtained in a hurry. The Executive have had only six days to see the business plan. However, since it only contains six pages of financial information for an operation that is aiming to turnover £3/4million a year, they could come to a conclusion quite quickly.

The clincher is the target market. It is aimed at schoolchildren in years 6 and 8 that are within a 60 minute drive of the site. According to the figures contained within the user profiles in the report, it is safe to say that the Sutton Life Centre needs to attract 60% of the entire population of children in years 6 and 8 living in South London and North Surrey. Not even Bill Gates would attempt market penetration of that kind within a 12 month period. They are helped by the fact that they will stop the existing Junior Citizenship programme thus forcing local schoolchildren to go to the new building or miss out. The fact that the existing scheme costs schools £3 per pupil and the new one £9 per pupil suggests that schools are going to be out of pocket again because of the Local Authority.

The charge of £9 is another optimistic assumption. According to the report, there is one place in the country vaguely comparable situated in Milton Keynes. Sutton's business plan requires twice the number of visitors paying a higher price simply to break even. I suspect that tomorrow night, the LibDems will be leaving their legacy to the people of Sutton. The likely £95k per year needed to keep the place open with just a 20% shortfall in income will provide 95,000 reasons why not to vote LibDem at the next local elections.

Council Pulls A Fast One Over £8m Pet Project

Sutton’s Liberal Democrat town hall bosses pushed through planning permission for the controversial £8million ‘Sutton Life Centre’ last week, following two planning committee meetings. Conservatives have raised severe concerns about the planning suitability of the ‘pet project’ as well as the cost, which has been labelled a “financial minefield”. Approval came at a second hearing after an initial attempt to ram it through late at night at the end of the first meeting.

At the meeting of the Development Control Committee, Conservative councillors questioned the suitability of building the Life Centre adjacent to Sutton Cemetery and Crematorium; the impact on traffic and congestion in the local area; the environmental impact of upwards of 1000 coaches coming to the area; the inconsistent number of visitors due to come to the Centre; and the inevitable noise and light pollution which will emanate from the site, causing disruption to local residents.

Committee member Councillor Tony Shields raised concerns about the climbing wall and the flood lighting which will accompany it. He also highlighted the controversy surrounding the disputed figures for visitor numbers to the Life Centre. A briefing sent to councillors in January stating that the Centre is expected to receive 40,000 visitors per year, a figure echoed in the 1997 feasibility study for the project. In contrast, the projected visitor numbers presented to the committee suggested only 21,000 visitors.

Scant notice was paid to the section of the report which explained that the Life Centre would be available to the public for private hire in the evenings and the problems in Alcorn Close, Barrington Road, Sherborne Road and Thompson Close which will follow.

Conservative Deputy Leader Tony Shields commented: “The Lib Dem-run Council has practically done nothing to consult local people. Additional and unacceptable pressures will be placed on local residents’ parking. Approximately 1000 coach loads of visitors from all round the South East certainly isn’t very green, is it?

“No one has asked for this controversial £8million pet project. The fact is even it’s major Lib Dem supporters have called this project ‘high risk’. They’re shoving Sutton into a financial minefield in a time of economic crisis. It’s now obvious that they haven’t got a clue how many people are going to visit the Centre. The project has been granted permission based on 21,000 visitors but they’re going to need 40,000 to keep it open – doubling the impact on the local area.”

Councillor Shields concluded: “Lib Dem town hall bosses must halt this scheme now, while they still can.”