Hard Hearted Conservative County Council means threat to milk for elderly and disabled

8.16.39am GMT Tue 7th Mar 2006

No more free milk for elderly and disabled.

The Tory Cabinet of Hertfordshire County Council at a recent meeting showed its teeth by deciding to use increases in charges to massage the headline increase in council tax.

Lib Dem Leader Chris White said: "It was bad enough that the Government were forcing through increases in payments for social care in the first place. But the really nasty aspect of this is that when Herts checked its sums it found that the draft increases in charges would raise far more money than originally anticipated.

"A decent council would have used this to mitigate the impact.

"But the hard-hearted Tories have decided to use the money to subsidise other areas in the council, supposedly to keep down council tax generally rather than help the most vulnerable of our citizens - grandparents, the disabled, those with severe mental illness and other groups who need our help."

Chris White particularly criticised paragraphs 5.2 and 9.8 of the report. "These admit that the original proposals would have raised £4.21 million rather than the £2.31 million intended. Even with the small revisions to the original proposals, Herts County Council will still pocket £3.15 million. The extra money should have been entirely ploughed back into services for the elderly and other vulnerable groups - the ones that are being stung for extra service charges in the first place."

Chris added: ''The comments made in the Cabinet meeting were an essay in callousness. There were crocodile tears from one member. Another applauded the excellence of the county council's consultation process - neatly ignoring the fact that the public rejected the proposals.

"The portfolio holder for social care was the best of all: he said that as Herts County Council had been the most 'generous' in the country it was time to get back to the 'middle of the pack'.

"But he did at least say: 'We have managed to make it a little less hard in the first instance' - which I suppose acknowledges the suffering this will cause."