All very welcome – City Hall needs money to operate but does it really need as much as it currently spends?
When that spending includes wasteful duplication of services within functional bodies and cars and accommodation for senior Met officers, the answer is clearly ‘no’.
Londoners shouldn’t be paying for waste when they’re watching every penny.
So any move to reduce the cost of City Hall is good news. It’s just a shame that the dividend after Boris’s three years of “sensible savings” amounts to little more than the cost of a single Tube journey.
It could have been much higher had Boris truly committed himself to reducing costs.
Instead he’s allowed waste to continue within his functional bodies, spent £60m on a cable car he assured us would be cost free and subsidised a cycle hire scheme unused by most Londoners.
The failure to cut council tax earlier suggests Boris really thinks the right cost level for City Hall is pretty much what he inherited from Ken Livingstone.
Boris loves citing Labour’s mishandling of the economy, but today he can be grateful to Gordon Brown for ensuring his Council Tax cut won’t go down as the stingiest giveaway in history.
