By Mo Money
REGULAR readers of local “newspapers” in Cumbria can always rely on a regular rash of articles about how hard-up our two Councils are.
This local authority propaganda is routinely published verbatim by our local media and usually precedes another hike in Council Tax bills.
Only recently, finance wonks in the Lib Democrat dictatorship running Wokemoreland & Farcical Council were loudly moaning about their cash shortfalls at a meeting – knowingly in full view of an impressionable young scribe scribbling away.
Sympathetic sob stories soon followed in The Wasteoftime Gazette and the Evening Snail about the “severe financial crisis” facing our local authorities.
Yet the Tim Farron cheerleading and acrobatics team in charge of Council matters in Kendal, Barrow and Penrith can easily find money when it wants to.
It plans to do up both Kendal and Barrow Town Hall, and last June opened brand new eco-friendly Council headquarters in Penrith.
And Wokemoreland Council is feverishly quick to dive into the public purse if its spending ticks a big Woke box, like Climate Change, Net Zero, or the 2010 Equality Act.
To this end, The Chronic’s attention has been drawn to a juicy Council tender that is currently up for grabs this month.
Wokemoreland has quietly set aside £400,000 of taxpayers’ cash to be spent over two years and is scouting around for a new service provider.
So what vital local service does it want to splurge nearly half a million pounds on?
Heating grants for shivering Grannies? Support for over-taxed local businesses? Activities for screen-obsessed teens?
Nope! The answer is providing a comprehensive Language and Interpretation and Translation Service for Refugees and Asylum Seekers.
This is to ensure that, when Council officers here roll out the red carpet of services to our newly-arrived friends from overseas, a translator or an interpreter is on hand.
(To be fair, the Council barely speaks Plain English itself, so explaining its many acronyms and baffling town hall lingo in Arabic may require a lot of to-ing and fro-ing)
The new tender is necessary, the Council insists, to: “Meet our public sector Equality duty by removing or minimising disadvantages faced by people whose language of choice is not English.”
An interesting term to use, that…Language of choice.
Ever-generous staff on Wokemoreland have written several provisions into its tender document.
The Council wants to provide some face-to-face translation services for Refugees and Asylum Seekers, but also wants to give them the choice of being able to have calls with Council officers via “video and television conferencing”.
This is not yet believed to be a common option for poor old Joe Public living in the sticks here.
We tend to get a lowly Council call handler or are fobbed off to the darkest recesses of the Council website whenever we ring up with a query.
How’s that famed Equality Act working for you?
But Councils spending on translation and interpretation services in Cumbria is nothing new after commitments made under shambolic Tory Governments.
Yet the amount of wonga being splashed on translators and interpreters by Councils in Cumbria is soaring.
That’s because the variety of cultural enrichment here grows ever more diverse.
In its final year of operation, Cumbria County Clowncil spent a quarter of a million pounds paying for translation services.
This was to help Council staff understand nearly 30 different languages by people presenting here needing services.
As well as European countries, some of the languages – including the countries where they are spoken – you can see in brackets below.
Arabic; Afghan; Amharic (Ethiopian); Afghan Dari; Afghan Pashtu; Bengali; Dari; Kurdish Sorani (Iran/Iraq); Kurdish Badini (Iran, Iraq, Syria, Turkey); Pashtu (Afghanistan/Iraq/Pakistan); Sudanese Arabic; Somali; Tigre (Eritrea, West Africa); Tigrinya (Eritrea and Ethiopia); Urdu (Pakistan and India).
Naturally, this information was winkled out of the former Cumbria County Clowncil in a Freedom of Information request.
Councils never willingly divulge it and locally elected councillors don’t enjoy the cold light of proper public scrutiny.
As for Cumbria’s newspapers and website Editors, this doesn’t seem to be much of a story that they’ve ever wanted to pursue on behalf of Taxpayers either.
The FOI request revealed that, in the space of a year, CCC spending on translators had risen by £100,000.
So back to Wokemoreland Council and its £400,000 tender, of which expressions of interest close on January 25th, 2025.
In the lovey-dovey, social media world of the lofty Liberals who run Westmorland and Furness Council, refugees may very well be “welcome here”.
But Councillors might want to start being a lot more transparent with the Cumbrian public about the bill for their bleeding-heart generosity – instead of pretending that the Council is short of money to justify annual hikes in our bills.
It’s woke, not broke.
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