News OnTheWight always welcomes a Letter to the Editor to share with our readers – unsurprisingly they don’t always reflect the views of this publication. If you have something you’d like to share, get in touch and of course, your considered comments are welcome below.
This from a reader who asked for the name and address to be withheld. Ed
I noted the News OnTheWight article on Tuesday in which Councillor Phil Jordan is quoted. He highlights that the latest Local Government Finance Settlement is; “…across all funding areas… £400,000 worse than we had estimated when our forecast for 2024/25 was prepared this time last year.”
I subsequently noted exchanges on various social media channels where constituents raised this issue with Bob Seely MP. Between the ridicule being levied at Bob, I saw he had (apparently quite unusually) replied to a couple of people.
In one response, Bob clearly stated “That’s not an Island Deal, although I’m trying to get more money for IW Council.”
At odds with what he has promised
That particular response concerned me because it appeared so at odds with what I understood he has been promising since first being elected in 2017.
It has the appearance of ‘shifting the goalposts’ and trying to weasel out of his commitments to us.
Bob’s Manifesto
I did some reading to check what Bob’s position has been: Page 20 of his own ‘Island Manifesto’ from 2018 is quite literally headed Getting an Island Deal – at the top of that page it states:
“In a report prepared for the Isle of Wight Council, the University of Portsmouth has estimated that the additional cost of providing local authority services – due to being an Island – is £6.5 million per year.”
So any assertion that an IW Council Funding settlement is somehow not an ‘Island Deal’ seems to me to be disingenuous at best.
The two terms are synonymous
The two terms (Island Deal and Local Government Finance Settlement) are synonymous – and as we can see, Bob made that very point in his ‘Island Manifesto’ (available here, should you any reader want to check it out)
Question for MP
So, my question to Bob Seely is simple:
If you have secured a better deal for the Island, why does our Local Government Finance Settlement not include a £6.5million uplift every year in order to make up the shortfall you promised to address?
I hope fellow readers will agree that simply trotting out a list of relatively token, paltry ‘victories’ isn’t an acceptable answer to this question.
