Roadworks in Medway

Image copyright of Ordnance Survey

This is something I started work on several weeks ago, after discovering (from a couple of my sources) that Medway Labour folk had been claiming that they were being discriminated against when it came to expenditure on road and footway repairs in the wards they represent. No evidence has been presented to support their claim.

This didn't make sense to me, as I have considerable experience of this particular area of the council's work and this claim doesn't accord with the reality, so I set out to find the truth.

I now have detailed year-by-year expenditure figures for each of the last five years, by ward, under seven different ledger headings. Below is the "bottom line" summary information, the first total column excluding amounts for planned works and the second such column including those additional two figures (planned road works and planned footway work). This is actually up to just last week, so covers not all that far off six years.

As with yesterday's post on child poverty, I have colour-coded the ward names in exactly the same way to indicate their (current) political representation...

Now, let's see: the lowest figure in that table is for Princes Park (£101,561) which has had Conservative councillors since coming into being. The next to bottom is Walderslade (£161,115) which, despite political changes over the years, has never had any Labour councillors.

The next one up is Hempstead and Wigmore (£182,229) which is the most solidly Conservative ward in Medway. Luton and Wayfield in fourth-bottom place is a Labour ward, though, so that's the nearest they get to being "discriminated against".

At the other end of the scale (to save having to go through all 22!) the top two expenditures are in the rural wards, which is understandable as those huge expanses have far more road, much of it used heavily by industry, than anywhere else in Medway. Just look at the ward map of Medway (copied from the council's website) to see just how much bigger Peninsula and Strood Rural are than anywhere else here...

 Okay, so we can discount those red herrings to avoid being misled.

So, which ward comes next down the list? Why, it's River ward (£617,318) which was entirely Labour-held at the start of the period this data covers, later becoming a split ward, and only months ago changing to all-Conservative. I have just looked at the year-by-year figures, and although there is considerable variation, between the different categories it tends to be swings and roundabouts. There's little if anything that could be made out of that.

Moving on down the list in terms of highest expenditure, next down is Strood South (£504,941) which was Lab/Con split in 2006 and is the same now. For some time in between it was Conservative-only. Next down comes Rainham Central (£414,077) which is all-Conservative – but then again, most of our wards have at least some blue in them, as the above official ward map very clearly shows.

Picking out the Labour wards specifically shows that they aren't suffering from particularly low expenditure; and even when it looks relatively small as with Rochester East, one look at the ward shows that it doesn't actually have all that much road and pathway within its small area anyway.

I could carry on, but I think the point has been well made: this is yet another of Medway Labour's made up stories, designed to hold onto the support of those still so gullible that they'll believe it. That seems to sum up Medway Labour in a nutshell!.