Kent County Council faces attacks from Prime Minster Sir Keir Starmer

KentOnline / KMTV

The Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer has launched a scathing attack on Kent County Council today, saying its failing to protect the public.  The PM and Labour leader was speaking at Prime Minister's Questions and called the Reform-led council, staggeringly incompetent and that he felt sorry for Kent residents.  It comes as KCC released a statement to KMTV today advising that councillors won't be able to balance the books this year, saying the cost of adult social care is the cause.  Finn Macdiarmid reports

Transcript

00:00Here outside Sessions House where for the past six months Reform have been trying to live up to

00:05these local election promises and one of those includes cutting costs and we know about their

00:10doge style cost cutting measures I should say that they inherited or brought on similar to the

00:18Trump administration. But fast forward to the start of this month where Reform's cabinet

00:23members started talking about some money issues that they were a little bit bare bones and then

00:28as you say we've received word today that they are in fact overspending by three percent of their

00:35total revenue budget. We'll get more into that budget in a second but first as you mentioned

00:40let's hear what Keir Starmer had to say back in the House of Commons today.

00:45My sympathy is with the people of Kent whose lives are being disrupted by the staggering incompetence

00:51of reform. Mr Speaker Kent County Council was supposed to be the blueprint for what reform

00:57would deliver across the country. Now we can see what that means. Cutting local services,

01:03raising council tax, failing to protect the public. That's all reform have to offer. Grievance,

01:10division and total incompetence.

01:12Said David, leader of the Liberal Democrats.

01:16All right Finn then can you explain what this overspent, where it has come from and a bit about

01:21the budget? Absolutely. So in that release we received today Kent County Council expressed that

01:28their adult social care budget had gone over by about seven percent or they sorry they they're

01:35forecasting this kind of overspending and on the other hand they claim that most of the other

01:40services are underspending bringing the overall position to an overspend of just three percent of

01:45the total revenue budget. So they're claiming that this social care budget is so is going to be

01:50overspent by so much that it's going to sort of drag everything else down. The council leader

01:54Lyndon Kem Keren has come out today and said the latest monitoring report illustrates the incredible

01:59challenges facing the authority particularly in relation to adult social care. When we were elected

02:04in May it became apparent how challenged the how challenged this budget was under the previous

02:09administration this department overspent massively. So you can see that they're highlighting this as a

02:15particular issue this adult social care budget. She added to remedy the situation we'll need to

02:20make necessary but difficult decisions and we will require some input from central government. Now we

02:26don't exactly know what those difficult decisions will exactly constitute but the council added they

02:30are putting in place a series of measures to reduce the overspend including targeted actions within

02:35adult social care and robust controls across the rest of the organization to mitigate the overspend as

02:40far as possible. So we'll be hearing more updates on exactly how they'll be tackling this. All right thank you Finn.

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