LETTERS – District handles big sums

As the day of the election draws closer (please don’t forget to take ID when you go to vote or ask for a postal vote now) the prospective councillors have set out their stalls.
It’s clear that a number of them are seeking to transition from parish councils to the district council and that’s a great thing. But they are largely different jobs, in both roles you need to champion your community’s voice inside and out.
Yes, you represent the people who live in your patch. But at district level you also have to represent the views of the whole district in all of the decisions you make and some times that is a very difficult call to have to make.
At the district you are also being asked to be responsible for a £100m business and if you add in the gross budgets of our Conservative partners in Boston and East Lindsey, there is a combined gross budget of almost £350m. That money is spent on a range of competing subjects, the current Conservative council has chosen to protect weekly refuse collections, where as we could have done what our neighbours have all done and gone fortnightly.
The council chose to introduce and subsequently protect ward budgets for each councillor, to make small interventions in local projects as they alone see fit. Other councils didn’t, by and large, introduce them and in most where they did have, abandoned them since. We have been able to do these things, because with the support of our opposition, we chose to share our back office services with Boston Borough Council and East Lindsey District Council, and later we chose to share our senior managers from across the whole organisation with BBC and ELDC, where as the vast majority of English councils (and all of the Lincolnshire councils) have chosen not to share. And its these sort of multi-million pound deals the councillors you elect on May 4 will have to first be able to envisage, and then to negotiate and then finally deliver, if they are going to be able to protect the frontline services you have said you value and want.
Gary Porter
Conservative candidate for Spalding St Mary’s ward