Money, money, money…

In my previous article, I tried to give residents an idea of the scale of the debt problem facing our town. Now when we know that Shirebrook is in crisis we need to find the source of this problem and eliminate it. You can’t argue with numbers: if we keep going on this road we will end with the bankrupted town.

I went back to the documents and start to analyse them again. Note: all data collected is for the period ending March 31, 2020 (the tax year 2019/2020). Shirebrook is not Clowne: our Council does not publish detailed budget expenses, so to better understand the situation I needed to compare STC with other Councils in the area.

I visited the websites of other councils in our region, downloaded their audit results and compared them to Shirebrook (a few of them failed to publish data: the most important missing are Tibshelf and South Normanton). It took me a moment to figure out where the root of our town’s financial problems lies. The answer? STC’s payroll costs. They are enormous. Literally- Shirebrook spend more than the combined spending of Bolsover Council and Clowne Council. Who they are hiring? Friends and family?

I prepared graphs to better illustrate the dire situation that we are in. In order not to compare apples to oranges, I divided Councils into two categories- the main towns of the District in CAPITAL LETTERS and smaller authorities in normal font.

The four main Councils are Bolsover, Clowne, South Normanton and Shirebrook. The rest of the Councils are smaller but even though- ALL of them have more or the same level of savings and way lower debt amounts. I added those small authorities just to show my readers and voters the scale of Labour Party mismanagement in Shirebrook.

STAFF COST

This is a really scary graph. Our town spends more on salaries than Clowne and Bolsover COMBINED. Reminder- the vice-chair of STC wants to hire a “Park keeper”… I really have to restrain myself not to comment on this in more honest, harsh words… I hope you see in these figures the threat that lurks on the horizon (a huge tax increase). One thing I know for sure: since I know how much other population centres in our region spend on the same purpose, such a huge expenditure on salaries in our town is very suspicious. This fact must be clarified at the next STC meeting. In addition- STC must stop hiring new people or we will go bankrupt earlier than I expect.

DEBT

As we can see in the chart below, nobody has as much debt as Shirebrook. If you are not horrified by the scale of this debt then you should realize that you are the one who will be paying it off. Long after we have left this world – our children and quite possibly our grandchildren will be still paying it off. 50 years! When in reality we just need to cut staff cost in half (to Bolsover levels) to pay it off in two/three years.

CASH RESERVES

This is a disaster. Even if you tripled our financial resources we would still have less than a comparably sized Bolsover has. A smaller Clowne has TWO times the financial reserves of Shirebrook. Tiny Barlborough (our town is three times bigger) have 80k more. Barlborough!

The worst part is that our reserves will start to melt away much faster when we are forced to start paying back the loan “we” took out to build the new Town Hall. Even tiny Pinxton and Langwith Parishes managed to maintain bigger reserves than our town.

Even if you claim the bad financial situation of the town is the Conservatives’ fault (some people on Facebook claim that)- how you can explain that other towns in our region are in a way better financial state? Maybe, just maybe it’s… Shirebrook Labour Party fault and mismanagement of current and previous Council leaders? Maybe, just maybe, Shirebrook needs new management?

Sylwester Zwierzynski info@shirebrook247.com

Data: audit reports of Parish Councils