TPA supporter Ian Taylor has handed me a couple of press clippings exposing an incredibly blasé attitude to taxpayers' money from Shepway Council leaders. They recently spent £2,000 of taxpayers money on a civic lunch for Council dignitaries, businessmen and 100 Mayors at ‘The Grand Hotel’ (how fitting) – enough to pay for two years Band D Council Tax for a single adult in the area.
Cllr George Bunting defended the waste saying it was only ‘modest’!
It’s this ambivalence to how councillors spend taxpayers’ money that needs to stop. One moment politicians don’t mind feeding themselves with £2,000 of your money. The next it’s £3,000. Then £4,000. By the way they squander our money on non-jobs and pathetic bureaucracy, they’re far from being the best judge of what comprises ‘modest’ spending.
Modest spending is delivering frontline services at the lowest possible cost. We need to eradicate the local government mindset that public money is government money and that it’s there to make the politicians lives better. The British people pay their taxes for services that can make their lives better, not to indulge self-serving politicians (no pun intended about the Mayoral buffet).
Cllr George Bunting, who thinks you should pay for his grandstanding lunches with other highflying council apparatchiks, can be contacted at [email protected]. Perhaps you can let him know that £2,000 of taxpayers’ money is far from being a modest amount and that given councillor allowances and expenses, they can afford their own lunches in the future.