Following on from a post by Cllr Grant this morning, we've obtained a more detailed breakdown of what our local conservative councillors have been spending, and frankly, its nearly as shocking as their attendance figures. Yesterday we revealed how the Tories only bothered turning up once for a series of six Shaping the Council committee meetings. Yet despite this some of the Tory councillors claim the most in mileages but have the least number of rolls, responsibilities and committee memberships. The Conservatives used to have an office where they held their meetings at Cherry Grove, which is 1.2 miles from Pitwood house. When they moved offices they were charged �481.45 by a removal company for moving their office literally round the corner. We'd also suggest you take a look at Mick's Comments on his blog about this, as he's very concerned about how the scrapping of subsidies for bus services in the Isle could have been avoided if the local Tories had not spent the money on them selves.

Removal Costs

The thing that's really confusing about their removal costs, is why did they need to pay them at all? Figures obtained via Visit Scunthorpe.Com show the conservatives spent �8,385 of tax payer's money buying a completely new set of office furniture for their remodelled offices at Pitwood House. So the first question we have to ask is, if you've bought new furniture anyway, what is there to move? Secondly we've also been led to believe that the offices at Pitwood House which the Conservative Group was moving into were already furnished. If your elected representatives had been prepared to make do with what was already there then they could have saved you over �8,000. Poor example really by a party which insists that the deficit is due to excessive spending, not the �1.3Trillion given to the banks or the �100Bn of uncollected and avoided taxes due from their business owning friends.

Building Works

In addition to wasting tax payer's money on un-necessary furniture and excessive removal costs, your local conservative councillors also spent another �3,715 of your tax payers money building some stud walls in their new office. Now we are unaware as to the intended purpose of these walls, but we can only assume looking at the defections to the "independent" movement of two of their councillors and the utterly disgusting attendance figures of some other Tory councillors at meetings, that they've put these walls up to keep their different fraction's apart. As we reported in our articles over the last few days, being a councillor is not all about commanding respect from your peers and having the public tipping their hat to you. Being a councillor should be hard work, and its all about working together for the best interests of those you represent. When the Torie's can't every work together then there's no surprise that they refused to work as part of a cross party committee as reported in yesterday's blog.

Furniture Costs

According to our sources, the office space provided to the conservatives was already furnished. The following list of office equipment was obtained from a FOI and was purchased locally. 2 x 1800mm right hand radial workstations 4 x under desk filing pedestals 2 x 1200mm x 400 mm desk mounted screens (colour galilee EJ125) 12 x high back operators chairs (colour smash AE058) 2 x 1800mm tall beech storage cupboard with shelves 2 x 1200mm tall beech storage cupboards with shelves 1 x 4800mm three section double d ended conference table 20 x padded seat and back side chairs C/W chrome frame (colour Smash AE058) 2 x brsa armchairs (colour smash AE058) 2 x brs single armchair (colour smash ae058 2 x brs armchairs cfw no arms colour smash AE058 1 x brt glazed top upholstered coffee table colour smash ae058 1 x 1400mm conference table section 3 x 1800mm left hand radial workstations 3 x 1800mm right hand radial workstations 6 x 600mm desk height filing pedestals 3 x desk mounted screen colour galilee 2 x 1800mm beech bookcase units 2 x 800mm low storage cupboards 4 x heavy duty silver metallic filing cabinets Total �8,285.70 We'll leave you to speculate if all that furniture was really necessary. Just as we'll leave you to speculate what the �12,482.15 of tax payers money could have been spent on instead; but looking at the proposals in their budget on the 23rd February we can see they are not interesting in supporting local residents and services, just their own self appointed luxury.