Woodchurch Leisure Centre, nine libraries, two golf courses and more are at risk after a crunch Wirral Council meeting tonight.
The full council meeting voted in favour of a £20m cuts plan which will see it pull funding for Brackenwood and Hoylake golf courses on April 1, as well as closing Wirral Tennis Centre for a 12-month period.
The budget will see the council withdraw funding for Woodchurch Leisure Centre and nine of its 24 libraries, after a period of several months in which local groups can bid to take them over on a community asset transfer scheme.
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The budget was passed by 52 votes to 11, with Labour and Conservative councillors in favour of the plan, while the Green Party, the Liberal Democrats and Independent councillor Jo Bird voted against.
The council has set its budget for the next financial year, following two government reports published in November which criticised the authority for failing to make tough decisions and councillors specifically for being focused on scoring political points.
The budget setting process has seen passionate community campaigns against the cuts, such as the proposal to close Woodchurch Leisure Centre. Some called the plan to close it “disgraceful” and thousands signed an online petition to save it.
Community groups will have until September 30 to come forward with plans to save the centre and the council will provide £330,000 to support any group successful in bidding to run it.
All 24 of Wirral’s libraries will remain open until November 1, at which point the nine at risk of closure will only remain open if community groups put successful bids together to take them off the council’s hands.
Those wanting to save Brackenwood and Hoylake golf courses, the two municipal courses up for closure, will also have the chance to put plans forward to keep them going.
But this effort will be made much more difficult by the fact that the council will stop maintaining them on April 1, something Keith Marsh, club secretary at Brackenwood, said would see the course go to “wreck and ruin”.
The budget agreed tonight will also see Europa Pools’ fun pool, in Birkenhead, close down for good.
However, the budget setting process over the last few months has seen several cuts plans change.
Among the changes made to the budget in recent months is the decision to keep school crossing patrols, the full climate emergency budget and the move to give community groups time to save the leisure services mentioned above.
Speaking at tonight’s meeting, Cllr Janette Williamson, the Labour leader of Wirral Council, said £225m had been taken from the authority’s budget since 2010 and it had lost £450m in spending power, something she said was in the name of austerity, a “cruel, ideological punishment” which hit northern Labour-run councils in particular.
Cllr Williamson said the budget looked after vital services in the borough and supported the most vulnerable in the borough.
The Labour leader added that she was pleased to have scrapped the planned increase in parking permit fees and given Woodchurch Leisure Centre a “lifeline”, as well as the borough’s libraries and other services so that bids for community asset transfers can come forward.
Wirral Council is led by Cllr Williamson, a Labour councillor, but the party does not have a majority on the council meaning it needs to gain the support of other parties to get its plans through.
The authority also abolished its cabinet of 10 Labour members in 2020 and replaced it with a committee system, which spreads power more evenly across all 66 Wirral councillors from all parties.
Cllr Tom Anderson, leader of the Conservative group, said errors the council had made were responsible for the current financial situation, rather than the government.
Cllr Anderson referred to the money spent on the now ditched Wirral View newspaper, and a £500,000 sum paid out as compensation to a developer for the council’s pulling out of the Hoylake Golf Resort project.
The Tory group leader said the government had given £265m to the council to support it through the Covid-19 crisis.
He said that although the budget was “far from perfect”, he supported it as it removed the council’s “eye-watering structural deficit”, protected the borough’s most vulnerable in areas such as social care and built on Wirral’s “great regeneration ambitions”.
Leader of the Lib Dem group, Cllr Phil Gilchrist, said the council needs a fair funding system and should not have to “beg, grovel or crawl” to get money that residents need from the government.
He added that tonight’s budget gave a chance to those interested in keeping golf courses running.
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Cllr Gilchrist also gave the example of the Lawn Tennis Association offering advice on how to turn Wirral Tennis Centre around and said the budget was too restrictive on things such as this and the council needed to be more adventurous.
Cllr Pat Cleary, the Green Party group leader, wanted to change plans which will see two of the 11 libraries originally up for closure, Greasby and Rock Ferry, remain in council hands, and replace this proposal with a plan which looked at all 11 of the libraries originally up for closure “in the round”.
But his plan was rejected by a majority of councillors at tonight's meeting.
Former Labour councillor Jo Bird, who now stands as an Independent, thought the cuts being proposed tonight did not need to be made and that there were other ways, such as using earmarked reserves, that the council could use to make up its budget deficit.
