I often see local Conservatives trying to airbrush over their failings while they ran Shropshire Council into the ground. Not a single apology or acknowledgement for their multiple gross failures. They really need to own these before attacking others. Just like the Lib Dems will have to accept ownership of the success or failure of Shropshire Council’s financial recovery.
Apologies for the long explainer post below.
Below are some graphs that sum up the scale of their failures some of which are listed with more emerging all the time:
❌️ Squandered reserves,
❌ ️Capital program riddled with unfounded projects,
❌️ Poor fiscal discipline with a ‘balanced’ budget that simply didn’t add up, and declining revenue position,
❌️ Poor asset management,
❌️ Record undelivered savings which never had a plan to deliver them,
❌️ 10 years of cumulative undelivered savings,
❌️ Poor financial controls – 6 years of failed audits,
❌️ No contractual controls for contractors, leading to missed targets… if any targets existed,
❌️ Extreme use of expensive consultants to fill knowledge lost to staff cuts,
❌️ Cut staff that actually generated income – like planning and leading to declining council tax collection rates, increased sickness absence,
❌️ 15-year backlog in road adoptions with DfT grant money left unclaimed,
❌️ No meaningful investment in back office systems to improve efficiency and drive down costs,
❌️ Moritorium on vital infrastructure spending to support development – Essentially hoarding it for the botched NWRR with spiralling unaffordable costs,
❌️ Poor political oversight of structural and operational decisions,
❌️ IP&E commercial failure costing millions,
❌️ Millions wasted buying shopping centres,
❌️ Millions wasted on NWRR with nothing to show for it,
❌️ Multiple poor investment choices,
❌️ Eye-waterly bad and the worst value PFI waste contract imaginable,
❌️ Winter maintenance program leaving grit bins empty,
❌️ Decided to not replace broken litter and dog pooh bins,
❌️ Slashed street cleaning,
❌️ Introduced managed decay of roads,
❌️ Budgeted for high take up of Green Bins, despite evidence showing modest take up leaving a £20m hole in budget,
❌️ Tip booking system fiasco,
❌️ Failed to deliver a sound local plan exposing county to massive speculative development,
❌️ Broke the partnership link with Town and Parish Councils,
❌️ Took residents for granted and treated public money like it was monopoly money,
❌️ Pothole Consultant earning £1,000 a day or £130,000 for sixth months,
❌️ Cut preventative highways spending exposing roads to severe weather, a higher failure rate and a massive spike in potholes,
❌️ Over £1m paid out in potholes compensation claims between April 2020 and March 2025 – more than any other local authority in England, Scotland or Wales!
❌️ Cut essential staff leaving whole departments bereft of strategic leadership or direction,
❌️ Dithered over Shirehall options squandering opportunity to remodel the site,
❌️ Cuts to staff increasing workloads to Extreme levels leading to a reduction in proactive enforcement ,
❌️ Taking the council to the brink of financial ruin,
❌️ Too many long-tail legacy issues crippling the health, finances and performance of the council for years after they left office,
❌️ Taking out an expensive emergency loan to cover day to day revenue spending in a desperate move to keep the ‘balanced’ budget on track before the election.
Meanwhile, a contrasting problem with government funding cut:
↘️The Labour Government cuts council funding including Rural Services Delivery grant, while boosting money in urban councils. Government grant cut by £8.8m – equivalent to a 4% council tax increase. Then they gave Shropshire Council permission to raise council tax by an extra 4% or £8.8m to fill the hole they created. See attached image.
↗️The Labour government introduced a massive MANDATORY housing target, far higher than anything ever achieved before in Shropshire. Compounding the Conservative’s Local Plan failure, brutally exposing Shropshire to unplanned speculative development.
The Conservatives and others will say what are you doing… you have been in office for over a year now. I don’t have a problem with that critism. But it is also fair to say that we have been stuck between a mountain and a hard place. Our mission is to get to the moon, but we have a Trabant that can barely reach the end of the road. Lift the bonnet and you find it has no spark plugs, no carburettor, and no fuel. All the tyres are flat and worn down to the webbing.
Every time I see a Conservative whine, saying we need to move on, draw a line under this or stop blaming us, I think gross negligence and they should be doing hard time filling the potholes they helped create. They want you to forget their litany of shame. I and you should be livid and remind them of their incompetence until the cows come home.
I take no pleasure in this mess and the real lasting impact it has had on the prosperity of Shropshire and its residents. But I am if nothing else a professional. I am determined to see improvement and a lasting legacy I can be proud of. I don’t do this role to puff my chest out or make a tidy income. I took a £20k pay cut from a well paid job and walked away from £10k of self-employed contracts to do this job. I expect residents to see the benefit of me doing a proper job rather see me swinging the lead like they may have seen in the past.
For the first few months we were fighting for Shropshire Council’s very survival, declaring a financial emergency as soon as it became clear the Conservatives ‘balanced’ budget was a work of fiction that Dan Brown would be proud of. Almost like items were included, with no action plan, simply to make the sums add up.
External voices have signalled the scale of the problem. SIX failed external audits with recommendations ignored. A critical CIPFA report. A Local Government Peer Review, highlighted just how functionally broken the council was without a coherent recovery plan, followed by a very critical external audit of the last year of the Conservative administration. Officers left high and dry with no support, under extreme dustress, battling to cover the basics. But make no mistake Shropshire Council has some very talented and extremely hard working officer. My role is to make their job easier.
Essentially the Conservatives left the rudderless Titanic steaming towards the iceberg having already abandoned ship with a hull so riddled with holes that it might have sunk without trace before even striking the iceberg. Behind the scenes members and officers have been working like the clappers to whack patches on the hull breaches just to stop it sinking, while taking control and turning away from the iceberg. The scale of the task shouldn’t be underestimated. Turning HMS Shropshire around and plotting a course to recovery isn’t a two minute job. We have to get on track quickly or we still face disaster. Drift is not an option.
The year since last September has been driven by stabilising the council, keeping the Government wolves from the door, adding capacity, generating extra income, being fiscally responsible, making the hard decisions ducked by the Conservatives, rebuilding our relationships with our partners, changing the culture of the council into a positive can do culture, providing strong strategic leadership, rebuilding confidence inside the council, restructuring the council to add capacity, transforming services from top to bottom, driving efficiency, planning for long-term financial stability. Change management on this level is never pain free and never quick. There is now no wiggle room and it simply must happen.
We do need to be crystal clear about what we are doing, why we are doing it and demonstrating the fruits of our efforts in order to assure the Government and the public to rebuild their trust. Things are in train in many parts of the council with the fruits of those changes starting to emerge very soon. More on those as they develop.
If you have read this far, again apologies for the long read and thank you for persevering to the end. Power to your elbow in everything you do 💪
Addendum: An Alternative View
Paul Wiseman over at The Alternative Council website has recently done his own breakdown of this toxic legacy in a series of seven posts listed below.
Paul has himself said he is no fan of the LibDems. His take seems fair to me and difficult for me to dissagree with. See what you think:
