Mary Reid

I believe strongly in the role of opposition in a democracy. Which is why I applaud the actions of Edward Davey in holding his ground during the debate on the European Treaty. When the Speaker refused to allow the House of Commons to debate the Liberal Democrat amendment, Ed protested vehemently and was asked to leave.

You can see the BBC article on this here, and Ed's own account of of what happened, and why, on his website.

It is the role of an opposition party to challenge the government, ask questions, dig into the detail, and where appropriate propose alternative solutions. And this is equally true in local government.

All this explains why I was shocked last evening by the Conservative approach to Budget Council. They did not behave as a responsible opposition at all.  They did not deal with any of the detail in the Budget that we proposed. True, they did make a number of speeches, but they were filled with broad phrases about 'reducing bureaucracy' and 'cutting costs' without pointing to anything that could help them achieve these.

It gets worse ...

The draft Budget was released at the end of January. It is a very substantial document running to about 100 pages and covered the proposed budget of over £100 million and its rationale.

The opposition councillors have as much access to senior officers as those on the administration. And yet it appears they did not ask for briefings from the directorate heads on the impact of any savings in the proposed Budget, or for any detailed explanations.

The proposals are subjected to scrutiny before they come to Budget Council. The Scrutiny Committee is run by the Conservative Shadow Executive, and they met on 5th February. They can call on any officers they like to help them sift through the document, and you would expect the meeting to be pretty lengthy.

It took exactly 45 minutes.

At Budget Council last evening it was clear that many of the Conservative speakers did not understand the proposals. Some referred to items in last year's budget as though they were in this one. We heard speeches on all kinds of subjects, including one, rather bizarrely, on honouring service personnel returning from Iraq (certainly not a budget issue).

And to cap it all they did not put forward an alternative Budget. This is the second year running that the Conservatives have refused to put forward any alternative budget proposals, but I can never remember it happening before, whatever political party was in control.

Indeed, there have been plenty of occasions in the past when opposition proposals have been incorporated into a budget, thus gaining support across the parties. So why didn't the Conservatives propose anything at all?

Maybe because it was a very tough Budget to achieve. Cuts of £4.5million had to be made. The Conservatives know that any specific proposals would come back to haunt them. On our side we had to bite the bullet, and make some reductions that we would really have preferred not to do.

And the opposition simply opted out.