What Labour finance lead Jacob Taylor said about the council’s £1bn budget

The Labour deputy leader of the council has set out his position as the cabinet member for finance on Brighton and Hove City Council.

At Hove Town Hall this afternoon (Thursday 26 February), Councillor Jacob Taylor proposed a budget of just over £1 billion in total.

This is what he said …

Brighton and Hove is a special place to live. I think as councillors and residents we all know that and I’m sure many of us still get that buzz of excitement when we walk along the seafront, when we catch a glimpse of the Pavilion, when we take visitors though the Lanes, or when we enter the Amex for an Albion game.

It’s not “Brighton and Hove exceptionalism” or civic arrogance – it’s just true. But beneath the sparkly surface of our city – there’s a darker truth. A truth that people outside of the city don’t always grasp: which is that we have a deep and chronic housing crisis and scandalous levels of inequality and unfairness.

And the eradication of these dark truths is what the Labour Party and the Labour movement exists to do and the reason why many of us chose to stand as councillors in the first place.

Our job is to help the city emerge from those dark truths into a brighter and more hopeful future. And we have a chance to start doing exactly that with the budget we’re voting on this evening.

Before I dive into the details of the budget; the figures, and the proposals, and some of the more shocking statistics on housing, I want to start with some stories … some fairytales. Because sometimes it’s good to dream, and to imagine utopias.

The first fairytale was one told by Councillor Robins in a council meeting last year. It was a tale of him growing up in a council property, surrounded by working families also living in secure social housing.

In this fairytale, in the 1960s, his sister became pregnant at 16 – and went to a mythical council to inquire about housing – to which the response was “here’s three sets of keys for houses round the corner – go and have a look, then pop back to let us know which one you like best.”

Or how about these fairytales, that have been dreamt up by my family? A fantasy story of my mum in her early twenties living in London and a few years into her first job, living in a housing co-operative (or was it a squat?) but facing the prospect of forced eviction.

The laughable idea that she might go to the council and, despite not being high up the priority list, be told that she would be welcome to take a secure tenancy on a choice of “hard-to-let properties” that other prospective tenants had turned down.

Or finally, the fairytale that my parents might move back to Brighton, when they had me, and buy a small three-bedroom house with their jobs in adult social care and as a radio technician. A mortgage that wasn’t a five times multiple of two high incomes but a three times multiple of two modest incomes.

And to thousands of households and individuals in this city – these stories are fairytales. They are unachievable dreams.

But the crazy thing is that these are not fairy tales. They actually happened. And the places mentioned are not mythical Utopias. They are Portslade, Lambeth and East Brighton. And they happened within living memory.

And so, we have to start saying – start demanding in fact – that if the country had the will and the ability to build two million social houses in the decades after the war, and if the country had the will (and the lack of sense) to decimate social housing from the 1980s onwards, then we can absolutely choose, as a society, to reverse the current housing disaster and to rebuild social housing, affordability, security, and decent lives for ordinary people.

The housing crisis in this city comes at a huge cost – and is primarily human. It is a huge burden on the residents who live in overcrowded accommodation because they can’t afford a bigger place.

It holds back those residents starting out in life, who have to live at home with their parents longer than they’d like.

And it has led to a significant fall in school-age children in the city as families move out or choose to delay having children.

And of course, it causes the unacceptable anxiety and distress of homelessness and the prospect of temporary and emergency accommodation for far too many.

 

The human cost of this crisis is our primary concern. But of course there is a financial impact we must consider as a council.

This evening, councillors are asked debate and vote on our General Fund, our Capital Strategy, Treasury Strategy, and our HRA (Housing Revenue Account) budget.

But we’re also voting on a plan – a plan to address the failures of our housing system – and to build towards a brighter and more hopeful future for all residents in the city.

Let’s be clear about some of the numbers. The overall general fund is going up – by about £8.5 million. But at the same time, the housing crisis of decades in the making, is manifesting as extreme financial pressure on the council.

In last year’s budget, we assumed that the general fund cost of temporary and emergency accommodation would be £8 million – and that’s a net figure, after housing benefit.

In this budget, we forecast pressures of nearly £20 million – more than doubling.

And the most ridiculous part of this whole story is that every single penny of that forecast £20 million would be going to private landlords – a ludicrous transfer of public money to private hands to paper over the cracks of a failed housing system.

We should also be clear – that simply funding that amount of money – increasing our revenue budgets to £20 million or £30 million or even further – is not progressive.

Indeed, it is the opposite of progressive – it takes public money that could be spent on any number of things and transfers it to private landlords.

What we have to do is fix the underlying issue. We have to reduce homelessness, provide more affordable housing and build up a stock of council-owned temporary accommodation in the short term to ensure public money is retained in the public sector.

That’s why we’re proud to propose a budget within £112 million of planned investment in new housing stock – the largest amount, by some distance, in recent years.

And that’s why we’re making use of exceptional financial support – to ensure other budgets are protected, and we have the space to properly address the issue.

And it’s we’ve put together a plan to accelerate our home purchase plan – to rapidly increase the numbers of properties available to house homeless Brighton and Hove families.

Now, fixing this issue is not just important for the families involved, although of course it is, and so that we stop giving millions to private landlords.

It’s vital that we fix it so we can stabilise our overall budgets and, importantly, keep delivering our ambitious programme and improving council services.

Tackling this underlying issue and managing our budget allows us to invest the £8 million we’ve budgeted to fix potholes, resurface roads and repair dodgy pavements.

It will mean we can invest £2 million in parks, open spaces and sports facilities.

It will mean we can continue the improvements to our refuse service and the roll-out of expanded recycling and food waste collections – after years of inaction on the issue.

It will allow us to keep open the 13 toilets we have refurbished and reopened, with potentially more to follow.

And it will allow us to maintain and expand our major investments in regeneration. Renovating Madeira Terrace and revitalising our eastern seafront, supporting the Royal Pavilion Estate, finishing Valley Gardens 3, investing in coastal protections and yes – getting spades in the ground and toes in the pool at a brand new King Alfred Lesirure centre.

In our recent refresh to the council plan, we described how we were building a better Brighton and Hove for all.

The “building” part of that statement is important: building new houses, building new sports facilities, new roads, new play areas and improved public realm.

But building a better city “for all” is equally important – because the reality is that tens of thousands of residents do not always get to share in the successes of the city.

We are an unequal city where life outcomes for residents from deprived backgrounds are way below what is seen in other parts of the country.

Which is why we have just launched a review into Inequality and Life Chances in the city. Not because we love reviews or theoretical strategies – the opposite, we prefer action – but because of the simple acknowledgement that what has been tried over 40 years has not worked.

Education and employment outcomes for our deprived residents are unacceptable – and comparatively so. We want new ideas, perspectives, and to challenge the city as a whole to meaningfully tackle this unfairness.

Because of the financial pressures we face, driven by a broken underlying housing system, and because we acknowledge that costs cannot keep rising exponentially – we also have to consider how best to provide services and how to achieve our ambitions.

And that means changes in some areas which are reflected in budget papers this evening.

I want to give a very clear message to our fantastic council staff. As councillors, we understand that many services are under pressure – and that this translates into pressure on frontline workers.

We also know that reorganisations and services changes can be unsettling and stressful. I want to be very clear: wherever there are staff or external consultations, they are meaningful.

Our job this evening is to set the overall budget envelope including specific proposals to help stay within that budget – but the consultations are a genuine opportunity to shape those proposals.

And in the vein, I want to talk to the proposal on Wellington House. We need to be clear that this a proposal to re-provide services – not to remove them.

The consultation with staff and service users is genuine – and we will very carefully consider the input before doing anything.

We will also carefully consider the proposal on child pedestrian training to ensure staff views, including possible options and mitigations, are properly explored.

I was pleased to join the various scrutiny sessions on this budget and I was also pleased that our discussion on the community composting item has resulted in an alternative proposal which we are now reflecting as an amendment to this budget and which I’d like to formally move.

We will hear from our two opposition parties this evening. And to be honest it will be interesting to judge which of their positions are more contradictory.

We will hear from a Green finance lead who said at scrutiny a few weeks ago, “have you asked for government support on these pressures and have you considered exceptional financial support?” and who will now request that we reject most of that support.

We will hear from a Green councillor, who as Audit and Standards chair suggested that our financial sustainability and reserves were very worrying and asked whether we were taking it seriously enough – only for the Greens to now suggest that we shouldn’t try to replenish our reserves in direct contradiction to the advice of the S151 officer.

And we will hear from a Green Party who’s finance lead said at last year’s budget that perhaps the council should rotate out of commercial assets and into housing assets – but who now opposes generating capital receipts to help us do exactly that.

And in terms of our Tory colleagues – to be honest, their contributions for the last two and half years can be summarised fairly simply: the council should do more, there should be more funding, more resources, more weeding, more street cleaning – and at the same time, nationally and locally, saying that taxes should be cut and the council shouldn’t try to raise revenues.

It’s an incomprehensible and meaningless position and to be honest it treats the public as fools.

But let’s move on from that – because to be frank the inconsistent positions taken by our opponents aren’t hugely interesting.

And they aren’t hugely interesting because they don’t really have a vision for the city and for local government.

In many ways, our two opposition parties express the same basic view, expressed in slightly different ways which is that nothing should change but that everything should be fixed – by someone else.

Well, that’s not our view. We have a vision for Brighton and Hove. We have a plan to make an already brilliant city even better.

Because our job is to offer hope and then to actually deliver it. And nowhere is that more important than in offering hope, a belief in the system and, yes, some excitement to our children and young people which is why it’s so exciting that our city has been chosen as one of eight local authorities to pilot the government’s new Young Futures Hubs, as part of the forthcoming National Youth Strategy.

It’s why it’s fantastic to see the newly reopened Brighton Youth Centre, part-funded by this council, maintaining our agenda-setting offer of mental health counselling in secondary schools and why it’s great to see some genuine national and local ambition to invest in our young people and their futures.

And in this city – more than most – we need to invest so that our young people are able to access decent housing in the future.

And so – the budget provides us the framework and the investment to get building. And that sits within the national funding picture.

One of the things I’m most proud of this Labour government for doing, is allocating £39 billion of funding for affordable housing over the next decade. And we’re planning to get our hands on as much of that as possible.

The government has just opened up the first round of funding – and I’m pleased to tell councillors that we are preparing to submit an ambitious programme of social homebuilding.

We already have strong plans – but in the coming 18 months we will be announcing more and going further. There are new sites being identified and planned for as we speak.

And these sites will sometimes come with difficulties and with concerns from local residents – and it will need all of us will need to proactively and proudly make the case for building social homes and, in doing so, building a fairer city.

I’d like to thank all officers for the preparation of this budget and, in particular, our superb finance team.

I’d like to pay tribute to our interim chief financial officer, John Hooton, who has done a brilliant job over the last year in guiding the council through this process. We wish him well in his next role and thank him for all the work that he’s done.

And I’d also like to offer a warm welcome to Elizabeth Griffiths – our new permanent appointment as director of property and finance.

What we’re voting on tonight is a plan to build a better and fairer city. It’s a budget that grapples with the underlying issues instead of throwing our hands up and ignoring them.

It’s a budget that puts our progressive values into practice and it’s a budget that we should all be proud to support.