| Topic: | Re:Re:Re:Re:Re:Re:Re:Re:Re:Proposed closure of Wandsworth Museum | |
| Posted by: | Malcolm Grimston | |
| Date/Time: | 09/01/07 12:02:00 |
| I tend to agree with this, but Lucille has just posted asking how can we put proposals like this out without having done the detailed work on whether the Court House would make a good library! If we had kept shtumm for another fortnight we could probably have kept her happy but annoyed you more! There's another problem with going too early as well, which I faced sharply when in charge of Education. We knew we were not serving local children as well as we could because some of our schools had large numbers of vacant places so we were spending money on keeping buildings warm, support staff etc etc instead of on books, computers and teachers. We knew we needed to close a couple of schools, and naturally we did some work on several schools before deciding how to proceed. If we had made public our proposals right at the start, before we had eliminated certain apparent options, we would have caused enormous concern among youngsters, parents and staff in schools which we then decided to keep open and indeed to expand in a couple of cases. What good would it do anybody for that level of concern to be raised completely unnecessarily? (You may recall the dreadful effect the Labour Party had on our local schools when it put nine of them on a 'hit list' without, as far as I can tell, actually suggesting that they would close those schools if they got the chance.) Sometimes it is actually irresponsible to speculate on matters or go to consultation before at least the basic initial work has been done, and that work always takes time. I would stress, however, that if we don't do something about the costs involved here then we have to do it elsewhere. Raising a lot of money by raising the Council Tax is not an option (even if we wanted to, which we don't) because we would be 'capped' - but we're getting a £5 million real terms cut in our government grants for each of the next three years and undoubtedly we'll never get that money back. So I would encourage all those who are arguing that we continue to spend £400,000 on the Museum also to suggest where they would prefer the savings to come from, so we can have the widest range of options in front of us. Maybe Martine or Lucille would like to get the ball rolling so we could get some initial work done - Social Services? Education? Recycling? Pavement repairs? It is not much use to us simply to have 'Don't do anything' because sadly that is not an option at all. |