Recently my time as Leader has been taken up resolving the council’s budget.

The council’s financial situation is challenging at present, although this is not due to poor financial decisions.  Since Labour regained control of Crawley Borough Council in 2014, we have made accumulated savings of eight million pounds annually.

The pressures can mostly be attributed to the national Conservative Government taking away nearly all funding that councils received to support the running of local services.  The revenue support grant and other associated grants that national Government currently give this council stands today at 8.6% of what it was in the last year of the Labour Government in 2010.  That’s over nine tenths of it just taken away, with nothing given to replace it.  That is a shocking position to have put local councils in.

One main reason for our difficulties now is the predicted overspend for Temporary Accommodation of £1.9m.  This is when people are evicted from their existing, usually private rented, accommodation and the council has a duty to prevent them from becoming homeless.  Our total spend on Temporary Accommodation this year is forecast to be £5.6m because of this.

We are bringing forward alternative measures which will reduce our reliance on nightly paid accommodation, which is very costly.

But the Government should be taking action because the underlying issues need national action to put right, but instead their response has been so inadequate they are asleep on the job.

This angers me because the situation is largely of the Tory Government’s own making – the impact of water neutrality (imposed by Natural England) and the use of local hotels by the Home Office, means that the Council is already facing huge housing pressures.  But this is just on top of their fundamental failure to fund and support council and affordable housing and Liz Truss’s disastrous budget which increased mortgage rates and forced many landlords to exit the rental markets, causing more evictions and forcing up rents even further for what remains.

It’s a perfect storm of the Tories’ own creation, for which we are all reaping the whirlwind.

Cllr Michael Jones

Leader, Crawley Borough Council