RADICAL plans to shake up the way East Hampshire District Council (EHDC) provides services triggered a spirited reaction during last week’s meeting of Alton’s community forum.

“It sounds,” sparked one sceptic, “like an EHDC corporation for profit not people.”

While it may not have been the response district council leader Ferris Cowper was expecting after outlining his unprecedented proposals to generate funds, his drive and commitment were not in question.

Rather it was the shift away from taxation toward a business model that some feared could lead to a loss of direct accountability and the introduction of financial risk. While acknowledging that this new modus operandi would require “a real shift in mindset”, it was needed, he explained, to address the financial challenge faced by local authorities as they fought to find ways of counteracting the reliance on central government funding.

It is expected that government grants, traditionally one of an authority’s main sources of income, will reduce by 48 per cent between 2016 and 2020 and disappear altogether by 2024.

By way of response, EHDC has adopted a commercial mindset that Mr Cowper described as “very different, unique in Hampshire and the South of England, if not the UK”.

While challenged over whether he had an electoral mandate to consider such a radical change to the system, his retort was that local folk needed to “buy into a fact of life”.

“Like the NHS, the model for providing local authority services is broken, we have to look at other ways of providing services,” said Mr Cowper, who said it was unrealistic to believe that, in the long run, this could be achieved by putting up taxes.

The long-term strategy, which he hoped to have in place by 2019-20, was to regard East Hampshire residents not as tax payers but as “customers” and to eventually eliminate the EHDC part of the council tax, using business initiatives to reduce the burden on residents and to replace and enhance what is lost in government support – at the same time maintaining all key services and to continue community support for parish and town councils, as well as councillor community grants, while planning to build new sports and leisure centres in Alton and Whitehill Bordon, to support business growth, and to drive forward the Whitehill and Bordon regeneration plan.

While many councils will compensate for lack of income by cost cutting, “our game plan is to improve services while maintaining a normal programme of community support”, promised Mr Cowper, who added: “The conundrum is solved by finding new sources of income, that’s the fundamental solution to the challenge.”

While there is ongoing consultation with the Government for local authorities to retain additional business rates from 2016-17, the revenue support grant is to be phased out by 2018-19 and the new homes bonus reduced by £1.3m by 2020.

EHDC intends to make up the shortfall in cash through money-making business ventures, selling its services to other local authorities, and moving away from finance to ‘blue-chip’ commercial property investment, which is already producing a much higher return. But in doing so it is also, he acknowledged, moving away from the tradition of being completely risk averse.

Other ventures are expected to provide nursery schools and transform existing services by offering paid-for extras to give people a choice, for example, of having their bins collected more regularly.

“Baseline services will always be free,” he said.

EHDC is already beginning to invest in a “personalisation project” to develop a new customer service, taking a lead from Amazon by giving each person their own ‘portfolio’ in a bid to streamline interaction with the council.

And in Alton, said Mr Cowper, there were plans afoot to support the introduction of a new town development manager to encourage and develop business in the town.

But Alton’s vocal scepticism remained, with concerns that zero council tax would result in a loss of direct accountability to the public, opening the doors to possible mismanagement.

While Mr Cowper explained that EHDC was already employing specialist advisers to work alongside officers on these new commercial enterprises, there were concerns over the capability of the council to deal with this business model, and what safety nets were in place to offset the risk of economic collapse and its impact on provision of key services.

Residents wanted to know where the money was coming from for EHDC’s property investments and if “Alton is paying the price” after plans for a new community centre appears to have dropped off the radar.

And should EHDC be setting itself up in competition to local business as a commercial enterprise?

While Mr Cowper gave an assurance that plans for a new £15m sports centre in Alton were on course for a 2020 delivery, there were eyebrows raised over a proposed “hybrid solution” to off-set the cost by sharing the facility with a private provider.

Mindful of the boldness of the proposals that would, Mr Cowper believes, put EHDC at the leading edge of local service provision, the message from Alton’s forum seemed one of caution – to not lose sight of the democratic role of local government in the fight for financial independence.