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Letter from: Jeremy Field, Virgins Lane, Battle

Re: Bernard Brown's letter, October 28, 'Council pools and priorities'.

It is a brave Conservative, or one with a very selective memory, that chooses to criticise others for their financial management when catastrophic mismanagement of the national economy will leave anyone with a mortgage paying the price for many years to come, and we are being warned of tax increases for all.

And locally we have the £220,000 cost of Bexhill seafront shelters that act as wind tunnels and still have holes in the roof to accommodate the planned trees that never arrived.

We could mention the considerable cost of the stylish seafront fountains that still don’t work, or the leaking Colonnade walls that leaked even more money than water. We could mention the comically catastrophic Colonnade Café ‘destination restaurant’ fiasco, the final cost of which runs in to hundreds of thousands as yet to be fully quantified. Or we could mention the £330,000 Camber car park refurbishment contract that was replaced by the Alliance at a cost of just £46,000.

Have you read....: Temporary restrictions to tackle inconsiderate parking in Camber Sands

But all of this pales into insignificance with the mishandling of council tax (CT). Between 2010- 2016, in order to keep CT artificially low, the previous administration accepted one-off payments from Government, paid to authorities making no or minimal increases in CT.

The problem with that was that the base amount of CT remained static, while costs increased. Rother’s chief finance officer calculates that by the end of this year, this short-termist approach will have left Rother’s reserves £7.4m lower than if it had applied the permitted CT increases, including over £900k this year alone.

As my father in law might have said ’you don’t get owt for nowt’. The false economy of keeping council tax increases below cost increases means you either run at a deficit, or you cut vital services, or you face a big increase when the proverbial hits the fan.

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It is a brave Conservative that chooses to criticise others for their financial management.