Town Hall Finances Show Frightening Spending And Waste Slams Romford Councillor.

Romford Councillor David Taylor today writes in the Havering Daily on Havering’s finances.

There’s little doubt that Havering has a financial black hole. There’s one clear cause of this, government is asking Havering to do more, whilst cutting back on the funding it receives. 

One of the biggest areas of this is in health and social care, which has turned our Town Hall into a mini-Westminster. Rather than focusing on repairing roads, maintaining our parks, or supporting our high street, huge amount of council staff time and money is going on healthcare. 

Going through some of the financial decisions our council is making is truly terrifying. Especially when you begin to add it all up. 

£85k a year is set to be spent on a ‘weight management service’. The description of the service includes ‘whatsappgroups for classes’. £151k a year is going to be spent on Stop Smoking services. £117k on a ‘healthwatch’ service to become a consumer champion for users of health and social care services. 

All of this is justified, in the proposal papers, as bringing us in line with some healthcare legislation. But why are local councils being asked to deliver healthcare? Surely this is what the NHS is for, and surely we’d get better value for money if we purchased stuff for the whole country and not just in Havering? 

80% of your council tax now goes on this social care spending, but we’re all still also paying through the nose for National Insurance. So now we’re taxed on healthcare on two fronts. And has it got any better? 

The wild spending doesn’t just stop at healthcare, and you paying for someone to stop smoking. It’s across the council and much of it is waste. 

£346,000 to be spent on some electric car charging points. Just 129 of them, making them £3k a pop. £454k on cycling lessons, for ‘carbon offsetting’. £135k of surveys for the data centre. £5k being spent on videos for children, to tell them about Havering’s healthcare strategy. 

Just this week, a resident shared on social media that they have a booklet about the food waste consultation. The resident shares that it’s in A4, full colour, 20 pages, 15 of which are a survey, but it contains no information on where to send the survey back to! Maybe this is part of the £70k communications budget we questioned for the HRA’s early introduction of the food waste collection. 

I could go on and on, but we’re now drowning in numbers. 

The point is that there are so many examples of pots of money flying out the door for rather strange things. 

There are three possible explanations here. 

Either the HRA are to blame, government to blame, or both.

The council is choosing to bring in food waste collection 6 months early. This will cost us over £1m that we didn’t have to spent. That’s the HRA’s choice. Spending millions on certain aspects of social care is a government choice. 

We are now approaching the final year of this particular council, with local elections due to be held in May 2026. This last year will continue as the previous 3, with the administration blaming everything on central government. It’s always the ‘tories’ fault or Labour. It’s never anything to do with the HRA. 

Alongside this, the council are pumping out their messaging that they are ‘taking the fight to government’. A social media campaign is running, in which Havering council share an image of a boxer in a ring. 

The image is more accurate than they realise. The boxer is alone in the ring, he isn’t actually fighting anyone. And that’s the situation in our town hall. All guff and no substance. 

We have had 3 years of complaining about underfunding. Have you once seen an image of our council Leader outside Number 10, lobbying the government? Remember when we all signed a petition a few years ago? Well the council tried starting the petition on the government website and it was rejected as it wasn’t submitted properly. 

The HRA are not taking the fight to anyone. They’re standing alone in a ring, pretending to box, whilst taking out bigger and bigger loans to dump massive debt on future generations. 

Havering is haemorrhaging cash and we can’t afford to go on like this, and here is my controversial opinion. Asking the government for more cash is not going to solve anything. 

What we need is a radical rethinking of what local government is actually about. Councils shouldn’t be spending council tax on telling people to loose weight or to help them stop smoking. It should be collecting our bins, reparing our roads, maintaining our parks. 

We need to shrink the size and responsibility of local government. 

And here is why that’s so important. 

80% of our spending is health and social care. So ,any of that spend that you don’t like will mean that the HRA simply point at government and say “they made us do it”. So that’s 80% of our council tax spending that our councillors can do very little about. That’s not a democracy, and how do we hold the HRA to account if everything is the government’s fault? 

Councillors must be responsible for the decisions they sign off. If the Cabinet Member for health thinks we should spend money on weight loss management then let’s have them make that argument. And, if the public don’t like it then we can vote them out come election time. 

In just over 1 year the elections in Havering will take place and this will be the message we get from the HRA. ‘It’s not our fault, it’s all about Westminster’.

If that’s the case, then why should Havering bother at all. We may as well lock the doors of the town hall and go home. 

Let’s not just fight for more money. Let us also fight for local government to be asked to do less, so we can hold them to account and start to cut our taxes. 

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