Kevan Lim

In any election you will get people making claims in their literature. Often its a question of interpretation.

So for example I claim that the £56 million taken by the conservatives out of spending on social care services over the last 4 years is a cut. The conservatives claim that they are spending the money more wisely mainly by charging for their services. So home care which was free for most is now a charged service.

So technically neither of us is wrong. They have reduced the budget and taken in a significantly higher proportion of the remaining budget by charging. They will argue this is fair, I maintain its unreasonable as some of the most vulnerable are paying higher costs rather than the general taxpayer.

So for the voter its a question of which direction is right.

However when election literature is fundamentally wrong how does the voter know.

The conservatives have now issued election leaflets showing all the council tax increases since 2001. Surprisingly their chart shows the conservatives responsible for the last 5 county council budgets. Which is strange considering they have only been in control of the county council for 4 years.

The problem is that budgets are set in the February of each year so in 2005 it was the Labour/Liberal administration who set the budget and with the Conservative opposition voting against. The Conservatives then won in may 2005 and inherited that budget.

So does it matter you may say.

Well I suspect most people won’t even notice. However it does raise the question, if the conservatives don’t even know how many budgets they have been responsible for, then are they capable of running the county council.

or could it be something to do with the fact that it was one of the lowest council tax increases since 2001.

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