Now The Ice Has Melted (30 July 1976)
Whether or not the development of Milton Keynes is a good thing, it is at least having one interesting effect. Most of us who have been here any length of time – say, 20 years or more – remember the days when this area seemed to be “the frozen north” as far as the Bucks County Council were concerned. It appeared that money could be spent anywhere in the county rather than here.
Loud were our complaints but there was little enough response. To the denizens and representatives of Slough, High Wycombe, Aylesbury and other southerly resorts, Wolverton, Newport Pagnell, Buckingham and Bletchley – especially Bletchley – were just overgrown villages, while the rest of the frozen north need hardly be considered at all.
In addition, the county council had bought up choice sites like the Eight Bells Field against the day when they just might want to use them. Result: more complaints, this time about the “dead hand” of the county authority.
One or two Bletchley councillors were even heard suggesting it might not be a bad thing if the area could secede from Buckinghamshire and join Northamptonshire instead.
SATISFACTION
Now the boot is on the other foot. Now it is the south that complains, not the north – a position from which we oldies derive a certain amount of satisfaction, without being exactly over the moon about the reason for the change.
Mind you, the new county council, formed about three years ago, really did have something to complain about until very recently. This was the transfer of Slough, the revenue spinner, from Bucks to Berks while Milton Keynes was, and still is, only a potential revenue spinner. The very recently announced government interest-free loan of £1 million a year to the county council could be regarded as some compensation for that.
The county council of the early post-war years had some ideas which today would seem almost antediluvian. For instance, I recall one or two annual budget meetings at which they congratulated themselves on having met most of their capital costs out of revenue. They had cut their coat to their actual cloth. This sounds laudable enough.
MORALITY
Moreover, I remember that only a little later Bletchley Council also seriously considered the morality of saddling future generations with debts contracted here and now. In the upshot neither the county council nor the district council had any option, if they were to fulfil their obligations to those future generations. Nowadays nobody is squeamish about asking for tick for anything at all.
Public indebtedness is an interesting subject. The county council reports that Milton Keynes borough now owes £52.4 million as against Wycombe’s £46 million and Aylesbury Vale’s £43.8 million. In their annual book off(sic) statistics they point out that the Milton Keynes debt is equivalent to £639 per head of the population.
COVERED
In quoting these annual statistics, the Gazette always used to point out that the local debt was much more than covered by the local assets. Am I not right in thinking that this is s till true today?
For instance, we are told that £28.8 million of the £52.4 million loan debt is on account of about 9,000 rented dwellings – which roughly means council houses. These, of course, rank as assets. So what is the market value of the average council house? £10,000? £7,500? £5,000? I do not know.
But if you have 9,000 houses valued at only £3,000 each, you have £27 million worth of property housing debt. And if they are valued at a more realistic £6,000 each, you have £54 million worth, which would cover your total debts on all accounts of £52.4 millions and leave something to spare, quite apart from other assets.
Similarly, the £639 each man, woman and child theoretically owed would seem to be more than covered by the amount of property each one “owns”. It would be interesting to know whether either Wycombe or Aylesbury Vale, while owing less, could match that state of solvency.
The item to worry about is the Milton Keynes rate of 15p in the £, compared with Wycombe’s 11.5p and Aylesbury Vale’s 13.5p. For years when Bletchley was “on its own” its debts looked mountainous, yet it had just about the lowest urban rate in the county because of the rent income from its factory estates. Must we really concede that those times have now gone for ever?
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