A former Conservative councillor has claimed consultation questionnaires designed to see how Lichfield District Council can find budget cuts are nothing more than a waste of money.
Joanne Grange resigned from the council after a disagreement with the party of the way planning rules were being implemented.
She said at the time that she no longer felt the local authority had the best interests of local residents at heart.
The feud between Ms Grange and the Conservative leadership has now re-ignited over a council consultation on ways it can best spend the reduced amount of money it has due to cuts in the funding received from the Government.
She said the exercise was nothing more than a box ticking exercise.
“I’ve got a suggestion on how the council can save money,” she said. “How about not issuing questionnaires when we all know the answers provided will be completely disregarded?
“That way the council will save the staff time for whoever designed the questions, staff time in analysing the answers, staff time in coming up with the reasons why the answers given by the electorate will be disregarded, and costs of meetings for councillors to ratify the reasons provided by the officers about why the answers will be disregarded.
“Of course there’s always the chance that the electorate will inadvertently come up with answers Cllr Wilcox is looking for and the questionnaire will be deemed to be a great example of consultation, but I suspect that’s not likely.
“I can’t imagine many council taxpayers suggesting setting up a speculative property company for people with no relevant experience to gamble with our council tax.”
Huge funding gap
Cllr Liz Little, Cabinet member for corporate and customer services, revenues and benefits, denied the council was paying lip service to the views of local people and businesses.
“We take feedback from our residents very seriously and are promoting the Your View questionnaire to get as many comments as possible to help us shape our future budget,” she said.
“The questionnaire sets out that we are facing a huge funding gap and that we need to look at our services and the way we work to identify ways to do thing differently and more efficiently.
“Knowing what’s most important to our residents as part of this is vital, as it will help us to make the right decisions, and so we really need as many people as possible to give us their views.
“Another way we’re trying to gain local ideas is by launching our new residents’ focus groups. We held our first two sessions in October which were really positive.
“We’re really keen to get more people involved in our focus groups, so if anyone would like to help us to shape our future plans and feed into the council’s next Strategic Plan, we’d encourage you to register to take part.”
People can register to join the focus groups by emailing alison.bowen@lichfielddc.gov.uk.
