Shropshire Star

Star comment: What is the purpose of Shropshire Council?

The unthinkable is becoming thinkable. The groundwork is being laid for Shropshire to be the site of a mass cultural cleansing, which could see museums closed, along with leisure centres.

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Shropshire Council's cabinet has agreed a strategy which will see the museum and tourism budget cut from £800,000 to zero. Yes, zero.

The £1.8 million budget for leisure centres and swimming pools also faces being cut. To zero. These plans are extraordinary and historic, but in a way which would make this a dark page in Shropshire's history.

Shropshire Council is styling itself as a do-nothing council, at least in some areas which are important and valued by ordinary people.

Those in the Telford & Wrekin Council area already know the feeling, as almost all the libraries in that patch are being lined up for the axe.

If this really is Shropshire Council's chosen way forward as it tries to get to grips with its budget challenges, there are some questions which arise which are vexed, to say the least.

It was councillors themselves who sang the praises of Shrewsbury Museum and Art Gallery, a project which was completed after great effort, commitment and cost, and was heralded as a jewel in the crown. With this zero-funding strategy, was it all for nothing?

Then there is the Quarry swimming pool. There has been lots of talk of where the town's pool should be sited. What the contributors to the debate probably did not envisage was the possibility that there would be no pool at all.

Opposition councillor Alan Mosley described it as "the saddest meeting, the most depressing meeting we have ever had in this council. This represents a catastrophe for local government."

It is a catastrophe for Shropshire people. The council says it does not want to do any of these things, and its hope of course is that these places will not close, but that somehow the community and committed groups will step in to keep them going – which will allow the council to wash its hands of them.

It might work in some cases, but the stability of having services underpinned by the council will be swept away.

Not for the first time, we have to ask what the council is for, if it is not providing things which Salopians have a right to expect. And it now faces a tricky issue as it asks people to pay more in council tax while ending funding for leisure centres and museums.

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