Immigrants And Old ‘Big Drain On Budget’

Immigrants and the elderly are pushing up Cambridgeshire County Council’s costs, forcing it to make millions of pounds of cuts. Figures revealed to the Cambridge Evening News show the council is hoping to save £2.8 million from the environment and community services office which looks after roads, buses, adult support services and the environment. Among the proposed cuts is £1.3 million from adult social care, which includes reviewing the help vulnerable people receive.

Coun Julian Huppert, Liberal Democrat group leader, described the plans as a “disaster” but Coun Keith Walters, council leader, said they had to be achieved if the authority was to balance its books by the end of March.

The cuts follow £10.7 million slashed from the council’s budget in March.

It is still working out how to save cash from its £540 million budget to tackle overspends such as the £500,000 black hole in the Cambridgeshire Catering Service’s funds, which has been blamed on TV chef Jamie Oliver’s campaign for healthier school meals.

There will be around £500,000 in cuts from the highways budget including road and bridge maintenance, as well as freezing the budget for minor works such as double yellow lines.

The book fund for libraries will only get £200,000 extra instead of the £300,000 planned.

Coun Walters said: “We need to get back to zero. We can’t go into next year, which is the most difficult year I’ve ever seen in local government finance, with an overspend. These are the plans we have come up with. We haven’t identified all of them yet. We have got one of the highest elderly populations in the country. Expectations are getting higher and higher. The Government heaps more and more responsibility on us every day without the funding to go with them.

“One massive pressure on us is immigrants. We are not paid what it costs us to pay for all the additional immigrants coming in, to pay for schooling. We get a lot of seasonal workers from new European countries and there is a rising gap between what the Government gives us and what it costs us.”

In July, the Newsrevealed it cost Cambridgeshire County Council £9.5 million to look after unaccompanied asylum-seeker children who have fled from the world’s troublespots.

Coun Huppert said: “The effect of these cuts will be huge on a lot of very vulnerable people across the county. Highways is talking about £500,000. The road network is already pretty weak and it’s going to get even worse. They are taking £1.3 million from adult social care. When they say reviewing packages of care for people, it isn’t just checking if they’ve got it right. It means they are going to get less care.”