Letter to the Editor: I was interested in the comments about the Lydney Precept from Cllrs Burford and Vaughan during the FoDDC Budget meeting.

I declare that I am no fan of the current regime at LTC, but for approximately seven and a half years, up to summer 2019, I was the Chair of the Finance and Scrutiny Committee so have some knowledge of the subject, and I believe in fairness. 

During my time as a member of LTC I became used to the inappropriate, uninformed and snide remarks by Cllr Burford on the level of the Lydney precept. At least twice a year I would remind fellow councillors of the process of “Policy - Budget - Precept” by which we would arrive at the figure for the Precept Demand, which after the application of the taxbase would give us the Band D council tax figure. 

Cllr Vaughan would have been in attendance when some of these presentations were made. 

I also did an exercise of stripping out a reasonable percentage of the costs (not the full cost) of maintaining Bathurst Park, the Recreation Trust and other amenity areas (approx sixty acres in all) which then gave as a figure similar to Coleford, and less than Cinderford.

This shows that all councils have different calls on their finances and cannot be compared  by simply looking at the bottom line. For information, currently Lydney Band D is approx £11higher than Cinderford (22p per week), and this year’s increases - Lydney 3.17% Cinderford 14.58% (last year Cinderford 10.68%) so I think Cllr Vaughan’s remarks are completely invalid. 

Why these District Councillors chose to make their remarks which were completely irrelevant to the business in hand, that is the District Council Budget, I can only surmise, but there are upcoming elections!!! 

I would also wonder why there was no intervention by the Chair, the Monitoring Officer or a point of order. 

These Councillors would be better employed considering the ongoing debacle of the Cinderford Northern Quarter, the salary of the new CEO and the financial benefit to the tax payers of the district accrued from the FoDDC’s relationship with the Publica Group, if indeed there is a benefit.

Brian Pearman, Lydney