London fire authority to discuss budget
November 19, 2008 by Staff · 3 Comments
London’s fire authority will be meeting at City Hall tomorrow (Thursday 20th November) where they will discussing a number of issues including the Mayor’s preliminary draft budget proposals for 2009/10.
Members of the London Fire and Emergency Planning Authority (LFEPA) will discuss ways the service can achieve Mayor Boris Johnson’s proposed budget of £431.9m (currently
£422.3m for 2008/09) and his direction that they use £15.6m of the Authority’s reserves to fund the budget.
Officials say they have an undertaking from the Mayor that any additional savings which are identified before during the budget setting will be used to reduce the amount taken from reserves.
LFEPA Chairman Brian Coleman, who is also a Conservative member of the London Assembly, said Mayor Johnson’s draft budget “provides sensible management of public funds to provide London with the fire and rescue service which Londoners need and expect.”
Coleman promised that there “will be no cuts to frontline services”.
Well Brian Coleman would say that, wouldn’t he!?
The Fire Authority have dipped heavily in to their reserves for the last two years running to my knowledge and the Conservative Members voted against it both times. They were warning this was unsustainable last year and even Ken was talking about replenishing some of the reserves this year.
Oh! but, silly me, I was forgetting, there has been an election since then!
It will be interesting to see how the two ‘independent’ Mayoral appointees vote at the meeting. One of them was appointed before the election and, when I met her, certainly seemed to me to be very independent minded. I haven’t met the second one.
The two mayoral appointees were put in place following the election, so the person who Peter refers to is no longer on the LFEPA board.