A few weeks, I reduced the size of the Crawley Council Cabinet from eight members to seven members. This saves £7,138 each year. In absolute terms, that is a large sum of money but it is tiny compared to some areas of Council expenditure, and compared to many other efficiency savings that the Conservative Administration has made since taking over in 2006. Nonetheless, this small saving received some quite favourable and prominent local media coverage. Perhaps it is easy to communicate, understand and support the loss of one politician from a payroll?
Only last week, an even smaller piece of Council expenditure, £1,500, made it to the front page of a local newspaper. This was spent on a map of the Olympic Torch Route being followed on 17th July. It is interesting how the smaller amounts make more prominent news than the larger amounts. We have made more than £7 million of efficiency savings since 2006 but that has never had the headline effect of the smaller amounts of money either spent or saved.
So here is a lesson learnt for me, or re-learnt to be more honest about it. It is not the size of a piece of expenditure or efficiency saving that matters but its newsworthiness in other dimensions. Can the story raise the anger of the average right-minded person generally, or earn their enthusiastic support? A sense of proportion has no meaning here. It is all about the emotional and psychological impact. I do not complain about this sometimes harsh reality but I do sometimes kick myself for forgetting such important lessons.
Even if our hugely successful programme of efficiency savings lacks the oomph for much in the way of front-page stories, it does carry other benefits for our community. We have been able to protect front-line services and expand them in some areas as well. The local Labour Party sometimes claim that they left a strong financial legacy enabling Crawley to weather the storm of the government’s CSR (Comprehensive Spending Review).
To an extent, 32 years of Labour control did help but not in the way that they may claim. With that much socialism, we expected to find a lot of fat and waste. We were not disappointed. It would have been difficult to have generated so much in the way of efficiency savings without Labour having created the inefficiencies in the first place. Offering my thanks would be cynical and inappropriate so I won’t.