Blogging has been on the back burner for age, not because of the “hate mail” threats but because of the heavy schedule of training sessions and meetings demanded by County Hall. I’ve had three compulsory training sessions, and more are in the diary, plus Overview and Scrutiny, Corporate Governance and Local Government and Democratic Services presentations. As I’m on the Audit Committee, we had to learn how to read an accounts sheet and fathom the mysteries of Local Government finance.

The Authority turns over some £360 million and manages a pension fund of £900m. The Council is legally bound to produce a budget by a given day and 100’s of officers are involved in closing the accounts for the year ending March 2008. (more…)

Now into the third month of its new administration, Flintshire councillors are coming to terms with lots more training and looking warily at the 5“elephants on the doorstep of most county councils, certainly this one. At a full training day in Llandudno on 11th July, the best speaker, a Daniel Hurford believed waste management, affordable housing, social services school places and climate change were just some of the more pressing issues we must address urgently. He added another which worried him even more; our aging profile with the number of people over 55 escalating rapidly and an eight billion funding gap in Social Services budgets. To make the point, he described how the Queen’s Birthday telegrams had risen from 255 to 7000 in a few short years.

The cost of recycling waste will soon rise dramatically and councils were facing a double whammy as charges imposed by Europe were beginning to bite and national targets to recycle more and landfill less were now close and stringent. (more…)