Town hall faces redundancy threat

THAME Town Council is to fight a move by the district council to cut grant funding for the Thame Information Centre.
South Oxfordshire District Council wants to base its funding to the centre on footfall, just for enquiries about its, SODC’s own services, and try to drive more enquiries through its website.
Town Councillors and the Town Clerk are to have a meeting with other angry town and parish councils in the district on Monday, to co-ordinate pressure on the district council to at least guarantee funding for a further year from April 2009, to allow them to budget for the drop in funding.
Thame’s Town Clerk, Helen Stewart, said: “The Information Centre offers a lot of help and advice to local people about the services provided by all of the councils that serve Thame. It is particularly important to those who do not want or are not able to access the web to do business. With the District Council offices being so difficult to get to, it is very important that a local office in Thame is not only retained but developed, so that problems can be dealt with at the first point of contact and not put on hold or passed onto another voice”.

She added today: “It is just not on to pull the funding now. We have already budgeted for next year for the information centre, so any drop in funding could mean redundancies.”

Photo: Thame town hall which houses the Thame Information Centre.