Over the past few weeks we have seen announcements drip feeding out of Cheshire east which amount to a co-ordinated onslaught on services to the elderly and less abled.
Care budgets are being reduced, transport for the frail to day care centres is being chopped. The home meals service is being scrapped. Cheshire east is quoted as saying that people should go to the supermarket and buy themselves a ready made meal as it would cost less. Do they not realise that the people who use this service are house-bound?
The information centre at Crewe bus station is being closed to save a miserly £25000 It is generally low income groups who cannot afford private transport and who haven't got access to the Internet to look up timetables who rely on this service.
So how could the council save money? Well they could start by scrapping some of the non-jobs which have sprung up even as recently as last summer. How many people even know about the seven Local Are partnership each with manager costing in the order of £50000 each and with a manger and support staff to look after them. (The Crew LAP manager is actually based in Macclesfield.)
Then we can look at the councillors. Do we really need 3 per ward? After all we only have one MP for the whole of Crewe & Nantwich.
Each councillor gets a minimum allowance of £13500 pa plus expenses. Then there are support staff and services. We could easily reduce the number of councillors by one third.
Then the money could be put into front line services where it belongs.
