Dartford council has approved plans for rising council tax and housing rent, despite the hikes being slammed as "absolute craziness" by Labour councillors.

A meeting of the Full Council last week agreed the council's budget and spending commitments for the coming year, including a 3.8% council tax rise which would boost the average bill from £1,800 to £1869.

Labour leader Sacha Gosine noted that 1% of the council tax increase had been devoted to a new climate change budget, which the group supported - but he said it could easily have been funded from other areas.

The Labour Group put forward three recommendations to the meeting, which were all turned down - firstly, that the council should not increase housing rents by 1% and should instead freeze them at current levels, secondly that £320,000 of the £2.08m net underspend should go towards funding 10 extra parking enforcement officers, and lastly that "a quarterly report detailing expenditure and agreed scheduled changes and variance on the projects within this reserve be approved by Cabinet."

Speaking to the Messenger Cllr Gosine said the council wasn't justified in increasing council tax or rent - which would rise by £2.50 per week over a 48 week rent year.

"They want to increase rent by one per cent, which will amount to £510,000 of income coming in," he said. "That sounds great but at the moment we're in economic uncertainty with Brexit. The underspend is currently £2million every year - my argument is why can't you use the underspend to subsidise the £510,000 and make sure the residents are in a better position?"

"If you're having an income of £2 million each year and your not spending that but you're putting up things like rates for residents, that to me is not the way you should be spending.

"It's absolute craziness."

Labour's Temple Hill Councillor Tom Maddison said it was no surprise that the administration had turned down the suggested amendments, but that the issue of parking enforcement needed to be taken seriously.

"Parking is a big problem, especially around Dartford," he said. "It's got bad, and parking dangerously has got worse, so there was Joint Transportation Board recommendation that they should take on board more parking enforcement officers.

"They're red hot in the middle of town but not so much around the rest of Dartford - it needs more enforcement to improve the situation."

But he added: "they always vote everything we put forward down."

Other significant areas of new budget allocation included £327,000 towards temporary accommodation and homelessness prevention; a 2.5% pay rise for council staff - amounting to £230,000; £46,000 extra for the Dartford Festival and £70,000 towards the new climate change budget.

However, the council's Orchard Theatre had its budget slashed by £50,000, and expenditure on car parking has been "adjusted downwards by £47,000 to reflect current income and spaces available."

Dartford Council leader Jeremy Kite said the Labour leader's criticism was misguided, and that their approach would amount to "frittering money away."

He said: "In demanding we consume our balances Sacha consistently ignores the medium term forecast which makes clear that the Budget would clearly be in deficit in four years if forward-looking decisions aren’t taken. That’s what budgets are for. It’s easy to look at your bank balance on pay day and think all that money can be frittered away but then you have nothing left to meet your commitments.

"I’m afraid Labour do this a lot. They simply want to spend money today without a care in the world about how the books are going to balance in the future. It might be good for their headlines and tweets to say that they will splurge money on this or that but the whole thing collapses in the longer term if we don’t budget responsibly.

"Sacha seemed not to have given any thought to the fact that the £320,000 they wanted to spend on more traffic wardens would need to be found not just this year but every year going forward. I’m afraid Labour’s grip of basic budgeting principles was all over the place and they finally had to concede that some of the things they were suggesting would only be in place for one year. They admitted that their ‘big idea’ on housing rents would only be in place for one year which is a lot worse than the annual reduction in rent we have made for each of the last four years.

"Finally, we were able to inform Sacha that his demand to produce a quarterly report on how our Initiatives Reserve is spent is actually something we have already been doing for several years."

"Most bizarrely of all, Labour admitted that even if we accepted their amendments they would vote against the budget anyway."

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