Supporting the new Labour Council’s policies should be easy because nearly all of them are the same as those of the previous Lib Dem / Conservative administration.

This is the claim from previous council leader Cllr Ian Marks in response to a challenge from new leader Cllr Terry O’Neill that the opposition should be fair-minded and constructive.

Cllr Marks said, “This is a back-handed compliment because they must have thought we got most things right!  Labour failed to put forward an alternative budget but now say they will honour ours.  They will focus on street lighting, cleaner streets, filling potholes, police community support officers, young people, discussions with the private sector, working closely with partners, the town centre, the local economy, Omega and a masterplan for the Waterfront.  They will put people first, listen to what people are saying and encourage staff and unions to come forward with new ideas.  This is welcome because we were carrying out all these policies ourselves!

They have a new priority of creating 40 apprentices.  We support this providing they tell us where the money is coming from.  They want to reduce the number on the Executive Board.  This is ironic because this is just what we wanted to do when we came to power in May 2006 but were stopped by Labour because of a technicality in the Constitution.

No increase in council tax this year is hardly novel because we set a nil increase in March as part of our budget.  Cllr O’Neill complains about the poor financial settlement from national government and says that towns like Warrington are subsidising the south of the country.  This is rich coming from the party that allowed £30m of our council house rents to go south, mainly to London Boroughs, by refusing to allow the transfer of our council houses to a housing association many years ago.

Sadly Cllr O’Neill repeats the lie about our wanting to sell Walton Hall.  This was never the case and he knows it.  He claims credit for stopping the expansion of Gullivers World and Sankey Valley Park.  He even uses the phrase we used earlier in a recent press statement about the scheme being ‘dead in the water’.  The truth is that this is nothing to do with Labour but a result of a shortage of public funding.

His priorities ignore affordable housing for local people, neighbourhood working and closing the gap between the better off and less well off parts of the town.  These would all feature in our list of priorities.  We look forward to seeing how their policies unfold in the coming months.  What I can say to him is that we intend to be a responsible and active opposition which is more than can be said of his party at the start of our five year term.”