This is not an April Fool – I wish it were. Today is the first day of Trexit when Hammersmith and Fulham leaves the tri-borough of H&F, Kensington and Chelsea and Westminster.
When Hammersmith was a Conservative controlled council in 2011 the tri-borough was created with Conservative K&C and Conservative Westminster. All commissioning to procure services was done centrally. This saved money in that one agency could do what had been done in triplicate and also the tri-borough could get better prices because of their leverage. It is one of the reasons that H&F has been able to freeze Council Tax. Last year it saved each of the three councils £13 million.
A year ago H&F now Labour, on purely political grounds, gave notice to withdraw from this sensible arrangement and today it’s on its own. This means that the council has to create the infrastructure to administer everything from parking permits to tower blocks; from IT to maintenance contracts. It is disgraceful that this has been pushed through a month before local elections on 3rd May. It is hardly surprising that the Labour council has kept quiet about their perfidy which will cost their tax payers a huge amount.
What is as disgraceful is that the Conservative opposition has not highlighted this act of financial suicide. The parallels with Brexit are obvious because it’s not just the tax payers in H&F that will suffer. Contract holders with the other two boroughs have invoked penalty clauses on the grounds that a third of their business has been lopped off.
Local government used to be venal in the 1960s but to see such naked political shenanigans in 2018 is more than depressing – it makes me furious. It is appalling that a local council can deliberately overturn a successful cost-saving strategy in the pursuit of left wing ideology. I hope that they get voted out next month but I’m not optimistic as so far the Conservatives have not highlighted this betrayal.