Sirs,
It is reported that Wiltshire Council is proposing to phase out – or cut – its financial support for day centres and luncheon clubs. This will take place over two years – fifty per cent will go in 2022/2023 and the other fifty per cent in 2023/2024.
The last time Wiltshire Council proposed cuts like these on the two Marlborough centres – the New Road and Jubilee Centres – Council leaders were forced, after great outrage was expressed, to withdraw their policy decision. That was in March 2019.
The coming cuts are not because these centres are no longer popular or valuable in their communities, but (the report in a local newspaper states) because the Tory leader of the Council, Richard Clewer, says the cuts will help to ‘ensure equal provision across the county, as funding is currently “unequal”, with just over £5,000 into Salisbury and about £73,000 of funding into Marlborough.’ So, the theory goes, zero funding makes the funding and provision equal and fair. Really?
The news report continues: ‘A new tender will begin in the summer for day opportunities, and the council will support clubs if they would like to consider “alternative sources of funding including applying to area boards”.’
And it quotes Councillor Clewer: ‘Our aim will be to ensure residents’ social needs continue to be met, either by existing community resources or through providing new services and we will be asking people currently using these services to share their thoughts.’
If the Tory Leader is basing his policies on ‘unequal’ provision across the county he ought to take a closer look at Marlborough’s share of the pie.
When Marlborough Town Council sent representatives to Trowbridge to see how the town could benefit from Jane Scott’s multi-million pound ‘Campus Policy’, they were told there was no money left. That was untrue. Just months later she found another £3m for the Melksham Campus project – taking its cost to £23m. And before Christmas yet another £2.8m was found for work on Melksham House, which lay at the centre of the town’s former community and leisure complex.
When the iconic St Peter’s School building became redundant Wiltshire Council said it could not become a community centre for Marlborough as the law said the Council had to get the maximum return on its unused assets. With Melksham House, Wiltshire Council seems to have been able to find a loophole in the law and give the seventeenth century house to the people of Melksham. Now Wiltshire Council are spending huge sums repairing and renovating it.
The ‘Campus Policy’ may be dead, but Wiltshire Council is still spending money – now budgeting £25m over the next three years for a new leisure centre in Trowbridge.
To equal the sum spent on Melksham’s ‘Campus’ project, Wiltshire Council would need to continue to pay Marlborough that £73,000 towards its day centres for 353 years.
When Marlborough was hit by cuts to youth provision for the county, Wiltshire Council closed the youth centre. Only some very determined work by a group of concerned town councillors and the then Town Clerk, Shelley Parker, saved the building from joining Wiltshire Council’s ‘For Sale’ ledger. They were able to turn it into the town’s Community and Youth Centre.
Wiltshire refused to pay for essential maintenance work, but did allow a grant of £10,000 from Area Board funds to help re-open the building. That grant equalled 0.04 per cent of the money Wiltshire Council is spending on community facilities in Melksham. No one begrudges Melksham their new facilities, but there should be some equality in the way our council tax is spent. It’s one thing to attempt some ‘levelling up’, but let’s just get the Council to level with us.
I could bore your readers with the money Wiltshire Council spent on town CCTV systems (‘around £450,000’ for Salisbury), while leaving Marlborough to pay for its own. Or how Marlborough tennis enthusiasts fought for their tennis club courts – with just another £10,000 Area Board grant out of a budget of £750,000-plus. Melksham gets new tennis courts courtesy of Wiltshire council tax payers. I won’t go into the inequalities of Wiltshire car park charges. Marlborough readers will know all about them.
I can, however, explain how most of the ‘Campus’ money was spent in areas where the LibDems do rather well at election time. Indeed the policy began after the LibDems were bold enough to take the Chippenham constituency in 2010 – spoiling the Conservatives’ total dominance of Wiltshire Parliamentary seats. The Council’s reply to a Freedom of Information request to see documented discussions between Wiltshire councillors and officers about the decision not to spend ‘Campus’ funds in Marlborough, said there were no such discussions. So that decision must have been taken outside the council – taken by the Conservative Party group of councillors. A party political decision taken behind closed doors.
The only way to get Wiltshire Council to spend money in safely Tory Marlborough seems to be to vote LibDem or Labour or Green whenever possible – and in huge numbers.
Yours,
Tony Millett
Clench Common
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