Confused.con

There appears to be some confusion over what the Council has been spending on road improvements recently, not helped by the LibDems apparently drafting their election leaflets in one financial year, and circulating them in the next. So here's an attempt to explain....

• In 2003/4 the Council's audited accounts (page 16) showed spend on road improvements of £6,770,241
• In 2004/5 (page 30) spend was £6,340,310
• In 2005/6 (page 44) it peaked at £7,542,899 - this was the last LibDem budget
  In 2006/7 (page 45) spend held up for 10 months at £4,921,681, but the paralysis of the Undercliff Drive witchhunt was starting to kick in
• In the 2007/8 accounts road improvements were too insignificant to make an appearance in the accounts at all. However, in response to a request the responsible director provided the figure in writing to Cllr David Knowles - it turned out to be the princely sum of £58,267, so it looks as though the LibDem's are being generous in their assessment of £123,000!

Moving on to the year just ended, several Tory hopefuls such as Peter Bingham seem to be under the delusion that £5.3 million was spent in 2008/09, although he must surely be wondering where it all went? He is of course confusing the "budget" of £5.3 million, which under Pugh & Co has become an increasingly "aspirational" concept, with what actually happened in real life, which was spend of less than 40% of that amount at £2,055,223 million. Of course this is an improvement of £2 million on the year before, but it still represents probably the second lowest spend in real terms for a generation.

So what are we to make of the latest "island News" election special promise that roads are, belatedly, the Tories' top priority? Apparently they are going to spend £19m over the next 2 years (yeah, right).

And of course there is the long delayed PFI scheme which islandnews implies is in the bag. I suspect that anyone who reads the County Press knows by now that there is not one scrap of written evidence for that particular claim.

Don't trade in that 4x4 just yet....