Today’s Guardian lead story that the Labour Party blew £1 million on the election that never was will cause a wry smile but no surprise amongst those of us who saw through Gordon Brown’s transparant reasons for calling off a snap poll. There’s analysis at PoliticalBetting and ConservativeHome - but funnily enough nothing at all on LabourHome. Now there’s a surprise.
Of course, the Unions will bail out Labour’s expenditure sooner or later, but who will pay for all the extra expenditure incurred by local councils in preparation for an autumn election? This must have taken a significant amount of staff time alone, never mind any additional expenditure and disruption caused?
By my estimation – and it is a rough but conservative guess – election preparations may have cost Salford City Council up to £10000 in staff time alone. Salford’s elections office would have covered the two constituencies of Salford & Eccles and Worsley & Eccles South. If we consider the cost to be around £5000 per constituency, then if other local authorities incurred similar costs then the total cost of the non-election to the taxpayer would have been over £3 million.
Gordon, can we have our money back?
(Of course, this £3 million estimate does not include any time or money spent by civil servants in Whitehall or taxpayer-funded Parliamentary staff)
This “conservative” guess of yours? Can you explain how you reckoned it up please Iain. £10,000 is an awful lot of overtime for a small group of staff to run up? Or are there some other marginal costs?
Obviously this is not a party political matter anyway. While we don’t have fixed term elections this can happen. And as a percentage of Town Hall expenditure it would be negligible even if it is a true marginal cost and not some accountancy exercise.
And while you have your calculator out can you please help George Osborne out? He claimed yesterday that we’d all – specifically Manchester people but it’d have to be similar for Salford – be £50 a week more taxed this year and another £50 a week the next and so on for five years. This following Mr Darling’s speech. Can you explain please?
Apparently by 2012 each household in Manchester will be paying an average of £13,000 more tax each.
I think George must just be fibbing to try to fool voters, what do you think?
I know what proportion of time the election office staff spent on preparing for an autumn election, which was considerable. Obviously I am not aware of the staff salaries, hence the “conservative estimate”.
And it isn’t just salaries – there are overheads too.
But it is NOT a marginal cost, that’s the point. They’re already being paid and if the possibility of an autumn election caused them to catch up with their work that is no bad thing. It will make it easier when the next call comes.
Nothing I see to justify the fibber George Osborne’s bizarre tax claims?
Chris,
I’m very disappointed that you think our election office staff were slacking off over the summer, and the non-election made them “catch up”. Our elections staff are thoroughly professional and I am sure that my Labour and Liberal Democrat colleagues on the Council would echo that.
The simple truth is that our elections staff spent huge amounts of time for over a month preparing for an autumn election that was heavily trailed by the Labour Government and then called off at the last minute. That was staff time they could have spent getting on with their jobs, and will have to be made up through overtime (on top of the overtime already incurred due to election preparation – which I didn’t even include in my cost estimate!) or the employment of temporary staff.
I have every confidence in the Shadow Chancellor’s sums, but as you selectively quoted Osborne’s argument out of your post and I don’t have access to a copy of the full article, I can’t really respond to it.