Opinion: The facts speak for themselves and there is nothing cheap about them

Fact 1 – The estimated repair bill for the investment in the London apartment block, which was purchased during Mansfield Independent tenure, is estimated to cost in the order of £20 million to make it safe. When all the work is completed its valuation will be about £6m to £7m.

Fact 2 – The cost of keeping the occupants safe which has been our imperative throughout. This has cost us up to £475,000 each year since the faulty workmanship was discovered – amounting to more than £1.5m and it is crippling us financially.

I have not put the blame on the Mansfield Independents, but have cited the policy of Local Government having to make investments into properties outside their district to try to protect their services, with the Conservative Government’s 10-year austerity programme as an indirect contributing factor. The reduction in funding to councils all over the country by 21-27 per cent, which is equivalent to somewhere between £16 billion and £30bn, depending upon which expert you listen to has led to:

Local Authority staff and services being under continuous unsustainable pressure; Cuts contributing to rising levels of inequality – the poorest in society have suffered the most; The cuts undermining the investments required for local councils to achieve greater savings and efficiently. There has been no spare money to invest in modernisation and planned preventative maintenance.

We have and continue to protect our existing services having inherited several million-pound deficits each year and, unlike the government, we have to balance our budget. We cannot, unlike the government, just borrow our way out of trouble.

Fact 3 – Labour ended the policy of investing outside Mansfield in 2019 because we viewed it too risky and unsustainable. We wanted to make investment in Mansfield our priority. The Conservative government later decided to end the policy of councils making investments, because the government’s own auditors concluded the same as us, that it was too much of financial risk

Fact 4 – The Meden Sports Centre was closed during Mansfield Independent Forum’s tenure with more than a little help from the Conservatives from County Hall.

Fact 5 – We made an election commitment and are confident we will attract funding of £1.5 million from Sports England and we have £3m from ‘The Towns Fund’ for a new Warsop Health Hub. So with the council’s additional investment, we will providing a swimming pool, a fitness suite and a multi-purpose games area for the residents of Warsop with construction scheduled to start later in 2023.

As for the Mansfield Independents trying to take credit for the development on White Hart Street, they had been running the council for 16 years prior to 2019, but the scheme never moved forward.

It has taken Mansfield residents electing a Labour leader with the philosophy of developing in Mansfield to enable the site to be purchased from the private owners and now a proposal for residential development is gathering pace.

Mansfield Independent’s constant mantra is ‘people before politics’, but it is clearly false rhetoric. My philosophy is policy and NOT personalising politics.

We have all witnessed what a sorry state this behaviour has got our country in and we do not want this behaviour in Mansfield.