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West End Extra - LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
Published:10 April 2009

Older residents will end up paying for incompetence

• WESTMINISTER Conservatives spend over £15million a year on temporary contract staff, including 26 people who are each costing the council over £100,000 a year.
The highest paid temporary employee is a project manager in the children’s services department who is costing council tax payers over £185,000 a year, including a 25 per cent fee to the agency who supplied the temporary worker.
Then there is the spiralling cost of the new Little Venice Sports Centre in Crompton Street which has increased by nearly £1million as a result of series of blunders and delays. The construction of the new sports centre should have been completed by February 2009 but has been delayed by over four months and will now not be finished until June 2009.
Recently, Church Street’s Labour councillors, Barbara Grahame and Aziz Toki, revealed that the council has failed to collect a £100,000 payment from Tesco which was due to the council following the granting of planning permission for the new Tesco store on Lisson Grove which opened in 2008. The £100,000 payment is earmarked to pay for new shopfronts for independent retailers in Church Street.
And who pays for this incompetence?
This week the Tories announced 10 per cent increases in charges for meals on wheels and charges for home care for the elderly and vulnerable will increase by 6 per cent in order to raise an extra £100,000 to plug the hole in the council’s finances. And similar increases are planned for the next two years as the council looks for ways of squeezing more money from hard-pressed elderly residents. We are concerned about the impact that this will have on their quality of life.
CLLR Paul Dimoldenberg
Leader of the Labour Group
Westminster City Council

Send your letters to: The Letters Editor, West End Extra, 40 Camden Road, London, NW1 9DR or email to letters@westendextra.co.uk. The deadline for letters is midday Wednesday. The editor regrets that anonymous letters cannot be published, although names and addresses can be withheld.
Please include a full name, postal address and telephone number.
Letters may be edited for reasons of space.

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