Shropshire Council to appeal for Government help at crunch meeting with MPs
Shropshire Council's cabinet will this week urge Shropshire MPs to help the authority secure more financial support from central Government after a stark warning.
Councillors will use their regular meeting with Owen Paterson, Philip Dunne, Daniel Kawczynski and Mark Pritchard to ask them to "apply pressure" on Government ministers in the face of its stark financial situation.
The authority is struggling with the costs of care in its area. In December the council announced it would have to fill a £14m hole in its budget, and financial director James Walton warned that funding adult social care and children's services had become “unaffordable and unsustainable”.
Cabinet member David Minnery told a town council last week that the situation will only get worse unless it is arrested.
The council's deputy leader and portfolio holder for assets, economic growth and regeneration, Steve Charmley, said councillors hope to make headway with the county's MPs when they sit down with officers and executives at Shirehall on Friday.
'Apply pressure'
He said: "[We hope] the outcome from it would be raising awareness with the MPs of the funding problems that Shropshire has, to put pressure on ministers and hopefully set up meetings with ministers down in London going forward.
"They can apply some pressure to ministers to try and help us out.
"The higher the costs go up and the less money we have got coming in, the less money we have got to deal with problems elsewhere."
It comes after Councillor Minnery spoke about the county council's finances on Thursday night, at a meeting of Market Drayton Town Council of which he is also a member.
"There's no doubt that more money needs to be spent in and around Shropshire," he said. "It's not just Market Drayton.
"The burden on the council grows faster than you can raise the income, not only as far as adult social care... but children's social care as well.
"The demand far exceeds what we can raise.
"That can only get worse unless something is done about it."
He said that in light of the new seats won by the Conservatives elsewhere in the country in the general election, the Government "should not lose sight of the towns that have supported them for many, many years".
"The rural areas in this county are really, really hard done by."
