AS I anticipated, Ray Gill, the leader of the Copeland Labour Party, has reacted with indignation at recent press coverage where factual information that has been in the public domain for some time was published.

This information – of a £13.2 million financial black hole I inherited on my election in 2015 - was certainly well known to him, and his group.

The public have the right to know it too.

The Labour Group can say nothing to dispute the authenticity of the coverage. It would appear that facts are beyond Councillor Gill’s grasp as he now tries to blame me for cuts made by his own party years before I was even elected!

These include closing public toilets and reducing grass cutting. Both happened in 2012. The truth is there has not been a single cut to public services since my election, and in fact, some previous cuts have been reversed.

The Labour Group will point to shortcomings in subsequent accounts, which I do not dispute.

We were still working on fixing the 2015 accounts throughout the 2016 accounting year.

The last time the Labour administration crashed the accounts in 2008, they had to bring in specialist accountancy firm Delloite at considerable cost and it took them almost three years to get the accounts back on track. I, like Deloitte before me, couldn’t wave a magic wand in 2015 and suddenly reverse years of political mismanagement; that takes time and subsequent accounts have, naturally, suffered.

When I took office in 2015, the council did not employ a single qualified accountant and the most recent 151 officer had just left, leaving a consultant of limited experience leading the finance team. Fortunately, I was able to appoint an experienced Chief Financial Officer to the role who identified the scale of the problems and we set about addressing them.

We were able to get £2.9m written off by government to enable the council to continue as a going concern, albeit the reserves were virtually wiped out filling an inherited £13.2m black hole.

A small minority of councillors, who I refer to as the ‘Disruptive Party’, have consistently tried to frustrate the recovery from day one.

Thankfully, both political parties under Lena Hogg and David Moore supported the recovery, as did the vast majority of councillors, and huge progress has been made and acknowledged by the independent auditors.

We still have a huge job to do as the cuts in financial support from central government over the last three years have been massive, but we now have a talented and experienced team in place. The intention is not just to fix what was broke, but to ensure it stays fixed. This is a lesson Labour have sadly never learned.

Unfortunately, the progress made by Labour between 2015-17 under Lena Hogg has been thrown away since Councillor Gill led them into opposition. He did this for no other reason than my decision not to appoint him to the Deputy Mayor, nor pay him the allowance that went with it. Since going into opposition, the party whip is constantly in place to frustrate progress. Fortunately, the sensible Labour councillors either do not attend meetings or declare interests to avoid voting with the whip. Despite being in the majority party, they have been defeated on the key votes despite trying to constipate council business.