Plaid Cymru Councillors Ask Wrexham Council To Use £583k Underspend On ‘Making Streets Safer & Cleaner’

Plaid Cymru councillors have called on Wrexham Council to invest a £583,000 underspend from last year on ‘making Wrexham’s streets safer and cleaner’.

Councillor Marc Jones said: “Plaid Cymru’s group are all new councillors elected in May. We understand the financial pressures facing the council but we also understand the greater pressures facing our town centre businesses due to anti-social behaviour and the drugs problem.

“Shoppers are now keeping away from parts of the town due to ongoing problems that have been widely publicised. We need to restore confidence in our town centre and I know there’s a lot of good work being done behind the scenes. Hopefully that will come good in the coming weeks and months.

“However, making our streets safer is something that needs to happen now.

“Traders are at their wits’ end, businesses are losing money due to this and we need to restore the balance. We know the police have faced drastic cuts in recent years and that is something we need to reverse but in the here and now what we as councillors can do it make the case for council funding to be spent where it’s most needed.

“The £538,000 underspend on council services should therefore be invested in an immediate physical presence in the town centre areas most affected by anti-social behaviour. That’s the Lord Street, Queen Square and King Street area of town.

Councillor Jones outlined some of the areas the £583,000 could be spent, including adding extra security personnel to the town centre team (which currently is one person), street clean ups to help ‘restore pride in our streets’, plus piloting varying car parking costs to attract shoppers.

Marc said: “Unless we try something different by lowering parking costs and making it free at certain times to ensure our car parks are full rather than half empty, the town will continue to struggle. Town centre traders need every bit of help they can get at the moment and this is another part of that jigsaw.”

Although the half million pound underspend appears to be lots of cash, Wrexham Council have previously played down the significance of such a underspend figure noting back in 2013 such a sum was ‘just under half a percent under-spend of the net budget’ in the context of a then £212,000,000 budget.

The Statement of Council Accounts for 2016-17 is viewable on this PDF, with the break down of various over and underspends in this PDF.

In the latter document we queried Wrexham Council two weeks ago on the 15th of June over the line: “A further overspend of £45k was incurred in the Markets budget as a result of the loss of rental income due to concessions granted and following the decision to move traders from the Peoples Market in January 2017.”

We asked for a comment on the apparent unforeseen cost, and if it effectively would be charged to the project or absorbed by WCBC. We also asked when the decision to go ahead with the decision to move traders was that figure, or a projected cost available to Councillors Hugh Jones and then Councillor Neil Rogers at the time to help inform them.

On the same day we also highlighted the line: “To date this year we have carried out 61 condition reports. These reports have highlighted an investment of £25m is required over the next five years.”

We enquired if there was comment and detail available on any of the major works have have emerged from those 61 reports, and if any in-particular make up a significant part of the £25m. We also asked if there was any urgent or concerning Health & Safety issues reported in the condition reports. To add some context to the figures we also enquired to how many condition reports were expected in 2017 and what the total number of assets was.

So far there has been no answer to either queries.

Top Pic: Our beautiful town.