Medway Council overspend risks collapse of services
Plus Big Spar is watching you, a conspiracy theorist comes to town, and you can't even pay your Dart Charge
Editor’s note: Some weeks, the Local Authority Friday edition features a mix of serious and light stories from across Medway. Today is not one of these editions. It’s a rather bleak set of stories, from Medway Council’s risk of bankruptcy to creepy new technology being used in a Medway shop to a conspiracy theorist coming to town. Stick with us. Things can only get better. We hope.
Medway Council overspend risks collapse of services
Back in November, we wrote a piece entitled Medway Council is on the edge of bankruptcy, which set out the dire financial position that the council found itself in. At the time, certain groups of politicians dismissed the story as alarmist and assured us that Medway faced no such risk.
Medway Council published their mid-year revenue monitoring report this week, and they paint a bleak picture of where we are.
The report sets out where things stand on a departmental basis, but the headline figures are that Medway Council is projected to overspend by over £17m in this financial year, and it only has £10m in the bank, and that doesn’t add up.
Since taking control of Medway Council, new leader Cllr Vince Maple has been clear that the state of finances his administration has been left with is perilous, but it was unclear just how dire the situation left by the previous administration was.
It’s not as if this has come from nowhere either. While local government budgets have decreased since 2010, back in 2019 there were warnings that Medway Council risked running out of reserves in 2023, and here we are.
Medway Council’s reserves have collapsed £41m in 2015 to £27m in 2019 to £10m today. Clearly, this course is not sustainable, and yet we have faced staring into the abyss seemingly before it has been taken seriously.
It is unclear what needs to happen at Medway in the immediate term. At the bare minimum, at least £7m needs to be trimmed from the budget to avoid running out of money altogether. To get there, the report proposes trimming all non-essential spending from the budget, reducing the capital programme, and reviewing land and building assets, but even with these, it seems likely that most, if not all, of the council’s remaining reserves, will be used during this financial year.
Medway Council’s own report sets out that the chance of running out of money this year is “highly likely” and that the results would be “catastrophic”. Indeed, if a council does run out of money, it is required to issue a Section 114 notice, which essentially blocks all new council spending beyond looking after vulnerable people and providing statutory services. In recent years, councils like Thurrock and Croydon have had to issue such notices, and a number of councils are warning that they will likely need to in the short to medium term.
For its part, Medway Council is calling for a ‘new deal’ between central and local government. While this is certainly overdue, it’s very unlikely that any such deal is coming this year, so probably won’t be able to solve Medway’s urgent issues.
Big Spar is watching you
As technology gets more sophisticated, so too do the questionable uses of it.
And so, here we are, writing about how a C-grade convenience store in Twydall of all places is using facial recognition technology to scan and store data on every customer entering the store.
The store recently installed Facewatch technology, a company so defensive about what they do, their home page is literally a note explaining that the Information Commissioner doesn’t find they are doing anything dodgy.
The problem here is that there is no regulation for how such data is collected and used in the UK. Big Brother Watch has put together extensive research on the subject and identified that people flagged by police facial recognition cameras are innocent in the vast majority of cases and that only 3,000 people have been wrongly misidentified by the technology.
A person visiting Spar in Twydall could easily find themselves misidentified and treated with suspicion in this store and the other stores where the data is shared. The aforementioned Big Brother Watch has filed a legal complaint against Co-op stores using the same technology.
It is understandable that stores would want to install something that proactively defends their property and staff given the decreasing police presence in tackling issues like shoplifting. But facial recognition technology is still an emerging technology where regulation hasn’t kept up with the potential risks, and leaving stores to self regulate doesn’t feel like a suitable solution.
Spar and the Co-op aren’t the only stores using the technology. A cross-party group of MPs recently called for House of Fraser and Sports Direct to stop using facial recognition in this manner, but the technology seems to be proliferating at pace.
As far as we are aware, Spar is the only store in Medway currently using the technology, but if you’re aware of any others, please let us know by emailing hello@localauthority.news.
Covid denier and lizard people believer comes to Chatham
Conspiracy theorist and generally unpleasant person David Icke is coming to Chatham next month to perform a show, with the gimmick being that it’s being held in an undisclosed location.
We do love a good mystery.
Icke came to prominence in the early 1990s by declaring himself to be the son of god before shifting into fringe conspiracies about world leaders actually being a shady cabal of lizard people. Which, depending on who you ask, is either the harmless ramblings of a delusional self promoter, or coded anti-semitism.
In more recent years, Icke has aligned himself with the more mainstream conspiratorial right, arguing that covid was made up and that 5G phone signals are a way to control us all. Or something.
Regardless, Icke is off on tour, and on September 15, he’s coming to Chatham.
Each venue on the tour is only revealed to ticketholders 90 minutes before doors open, which sounds like a massive pain in the arse to us, but also likely a good way to dodge any serious scrutiny or protestors from popping along.
So, where is this venue?
We know it’s in Chatham. We know it has a free car park, where you can leave your car overnight, and you don’t need to give your registration details. The ticket details show that the venue has 18 rows of seats.
Anyone wanting to pop along can grab a ticket that ranges from £35 to £55, and you can even treat yourself to a copy of Icke’s latest book for a mere £22.50 extra.
If you know where the event is being held, we’d love to hear from you. Email us at hello@localauthority.news.
You can’t even pay £2 to drive to Essex these days
A rare non-Medway story for us here as chaos continues to engulf the Dartford Crossing payment system following a change in payment providers over a week ago. We’re allowing it on the basis that the Dartford Crossing is the most direct route from our part of Kent to Essex and the scary north beyond, and hundreds of Medway residents use it every day.
For reasons that still remain unclear, all users making a crossing, even if they already have an account, need to log in and revalidate their payment card details despite already having them on file to automatically make payments. Anyone failing to do so risks not being able to pay for their crossing, and thus facing a hefty fine.
Given this has been going on for over a week and you are meant to pay for a crossing within 48 hours of a journey, things hardly seem ideal.
The payment deadline for any crossings made since 27 July has now been extended to 15 August, assuming the website works by then. But it’s all very messy, particularly for a system that is supposed to work automatically.
To give this a tenuous Medway link, it also doesn’t bode well for the smooth operation of the Lower Thames Crossing, which is supposed to operate on a similar tolling system. But given this country’s utter inability to build large-scale infrastructure projects, we wouldn’t bet on that being completed this side of 2050.
Thanks to reader Neil Swan for sending in this picture to illustrate his frustration after trying to pay for a crossing as part of a trip to Southend last week. Truly a gold medal worthy entry to the Angry People in Local Newspapers genre.
In brief
🧑⚕️ The University of Greenwich is set to launch midwifery courses on its Medway campus. It comes after Canterbury Christ Church scrapped the course earlier this year.
🛒 Wilko has entered administration, putting their stores at risk of closure. The chain currently operates in Chatham, Gillingham, Rainham, and Strood.
🏗️ There’s drone footage of the building work happening at Splashes in Rainham. The video will be a lovely memento when the project bankrupts the council.
🏘️ Studio flats in Gillingham are now being rented for £1,100pcm. Which seems totally fine and sustainable.
Can you help us?
We’re looking into the incredibly sexy subject of planning enforcement within Medway. Have you dealt with a planning enforcement case? Do you know of properties nearby that are in breach of planning rules but not much is being done? We’d love to hear about your experiences, good or bad.
Email hello@localauthority.news if you’re able to help out with the above either on or off the record, or if you have any stories that might be of interest to our readers.
More Authority
Paid supporters of Local Authority receive extra editions of the newsletter every week. This week, we published a triple header of extra editions. First of all, we interviewed local creative Esther Johnson on her journey to running a small gift business. We also published our monthly event guide, highlighting interesting things happening in our towns this month. Finally, we put out the audio recording of our recent Medway Question Time event if you missed attending that in person.
Becoming a paid supporter ensures we can keep this thing running for the long term and costs less than £1 per week when joining us for a year. Not only that, you can get your first month totally free with no strings attached. Think about it!
We’ll also be at the Art Flea Fair at Sun Pier House tomorrow (Sat 5 Aug) with a stall selling bits from our Medwayish merch range, as well as discounted Local Authority subscriptions. Come and say hi if you’re around! You can find out more details about the event here.
Footnotes
Music that soundtracked the creation of this newsletter: You Can Do Better by Johnny Foreigner, Therapy Island by Cheekface, and Hold On Now, Youngster… by Los Campesinos!.
While I always enjoy finding out about the music that soundtracked the newsletter, one day could you please listen to something by someone this 60+ year-old reader may have heard of? The latest Hawkwind album is very good... :)
Because it's not depressing enough, any chance of an indicator of what the new council will/will not be able to fund of their responsibilities in their first term? So we can start identifying what the community will need to DIY (those parts of it that don't spend their time ruining public goods already). I'm guessing potholes for a start. Where's me shovel...?