Wirral Council is set to make the most fundamental changesto how services are delivered in our area.
The aim is that Council services should be much more sensitive to local demands. The Council has therefore established four constituency committees.
Last Thursday the Birkenhead councillors and I decided to find out how much public money is spent in Wirral. We know the total Council budget for Wirral. But we don’t know how it’s divided between the four constituencies.
More importantly, we don’t know the budgets of the other great public services in the Wirral and how these breakdown on a constituency basis. How is our NHS budget spent for example…or the police, or the fire service, or the ambulance service?
The Birkenhead committee does not simply just want to know how these budgets divide down into constituency level, but also on what criteria have these public bodies decided to spend what they do spend?
The leader of the council actually earned his doctorate by asking a similar fundamental question of the nation’s budget. His answer was most public spending was decided by legislation passed by Mr Attlee or Neville Chamberlain.
I expect that we will find much the same with local budgets. So we need an equally important piece of information to guide our work.
We need to consider what we mean by need. And then we need to look at those main objectives that the council has set for its corporate goals.
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