Spend less cash promoting Bedford’s mayor and more on buses says councillor

Less money should be spent on “recycling” press releases and promoting Bedford’s mayor – and should be spent on rural buses instead, a senior Conservative councillor has said.

Cutting money from the “excessive” budget for communications and putting it towards subsidising buses was part of the Conservative Group’s proposed amendment to the council’s new budget.

But a member of the council’s executive said cutting communications would be “short-sighted” and residents need to be kept up to date on “deeply serious” issues.

The group’s leader, councillor Graeme Coombes (Wilshamstead) told the Full Council Meeting (Wednesday, February 1) that the proposed budget doesn’t give the rural bus service the focus it requires.

“Due to recent changes in the bus timetables, many rural areas have been left with greatly reduced or heavily altered bus services,” he said.

“Residents in rural parts of the borough can face extremely long commutes. We need to do more for rural buses.

“To fund this we propose cutting the council’s excessive budget for communications by £100,000 pounds.

“Expenditure on self-promotion by the borough’s communications department seems unnecessarily wasteful, and unjustified in the face of mounting financial pressures.

“It does seem the council’s communications department is scraping around for things to do, seeing as they have to recycle the same press releases about fly tipping – five times.

“I know recycling is absolutely all the rage at the moment, and so it should be. But I didn’t realise it stooped to actually recycling the same old press releases,” he said.

Councillor Charles Royden (LibDems, Brickhill), the portfolio holder for environment, highways and transport, said the £100,000 “wouldn’t even touch the sides” in terms of restoring bus services.

He added that the fly-tipping press releases are not recycled.

“They’re actually new cases of fly-tipping which this council is taking prosecutions for,” he said.

Councillor Ben Foley (Green, Castle) said: “We’re very glad to hear of the Conservative support for rural buses.

“But of course some of us remember that this is against a background of decades of cuts since the Conservative privatisation [of public transport].

“And then under Conservative, Labour, and also the Conservative/LibDem Coalition government.

“Cuts upon cuts, that’s why our rural buses are in such a bad state,” he said.

Councillor Henry Vann (LibDems, De Parys) said cutting funding from communications would be “short-sighted”.

“It feels like the Conservative Group really want us to operate in a cloud of secrecy and not tell people what we’re up to,” he said.

“Some of the issues [we promote] are deeply serious and we need to be able to tell residents about them, from voting to help that matters.”

Councillor Coombs said no one was disputing how valuable the communications team is.

“But the mayor cutting a ribbon to open a road, the mayor stood in front of a shop opening it, it is very much self-promoting of the mayor.

“And the issue is not saying ‘shut it down’, nobody said that, what we said was to reduce the budget.

“It seems to be top heavy with staff and you need to reduce it,” he said.

The Conservative budget proposal, which also included freezing the current rate of core council tax instead of increasing it by 0.9 per cent was rejected.