IN last week’s meeting of all Monmouthshire county councillors, we discussed the Labour administration’s corporate plan – this is the overarching strategy document for the council to follow for the next five years. As a document for an organisation employing nearly 4,000 people with an annual spend of nearly a third of a billion pounds, it needed to be comprehensive.

This was the fifth version that the Cabinet had shared with us – several others had been rejected by all opposition parties, including the first which was just seven pages long! We genuinely wanted to find agreement across the political parties because the council needed a plan as we’re already a year into this current five-year term.

While we had held several private meetings with the administration to try to improve their plan, what we were presented with still contained mistakes and was lacking in key areas. There were sections which had been cut and pasted from previous council documents, including the entire values section, which had been cut and pasted from the corporate plan of the previous Conservative administration.

We felt that it wasn’t sufficiently ambitious or innovative and a failure to drive efficiencies through innovation could result in higher than necessary council tax rises in future years.

We also had concerns that the plan didn’t have a clear enough set of measures and metrics by which the administration can be held to account for delivering on its promises. We found the language to be quite woolly and vague. The main theme in the document was tackling inequalities and helping those who feel excluded, which is all very well-meaning, but there was very little about what the council is actually going to do to help residents and better deliver key services.

There was very little about what the council will do to support older people, while the education section, having been right at the front of the previous Conservative plan, was hidden at the back, the lowest of the six priorities. Overall we felt it was a disappointing effort, but as this was the fifth version, the third full council debate and now a year since the new Labour administration was elected, we believed it would be reckless for the council to continue without a plan of any sort. So we abstained to allow the plan to pass.

It’s not ideal but this version was a significant improvement on previous versions and better represented the common ground that does exist between Labour, Conservative, Independent and Green councillors