CUTBACKS TO THE FUTURE!
CONTROVERSIAL plans to balance the books announced by Nottinghamshire County Council yesterday have raised eyebrows amongst ratepayers. For the cash-strapped borough intends to save money in the 2021-22 financial year by cutting services... in the nineteen-twenties!
The scheme, thought to be the first of its kind in the country, will see the cash-strapped local authority employing Back to the Future-style ‘time engineering’ to make cuts in the third decade of the twentieth century in order to protect council services in the present day.
“It’s really quite simple if you think about it,” Alderman Tom Finch told reporters. “We’re simply going to go back in time to the twenties and cut services across the board. We don’t need them now, because those days are gone.”
“That frees up much-needed money for the present day residents of Nottinghamshire to spend on things like improved bin collections and mending holes in the road.”
LIBRARY
One area thought to be ripe for cuts a century ago is Nottinghamshire’s former library services.
“We’ve been looking through the borough records, and back in the twenties there were twelve libraries in Nottingham City Centre alone,” Finch told reporters. “Nobody needs that many libraries, and bending the laws of physics in order to sell off eleven of them will allow us to keep our one remaining library open at least three days a week in the present day.”
BILLIARD ROOM
But the plans to save money on past salaries have upset many people, not least of all Nottinghamshire County Council employees.
“They intend to go back and halve the wages of everyone who was working for the council a hundred years ago,” said a planning officer who wished to remain anonymous. “Not only that, but they intend to remove paid holidays and put all the staff on zero hours contracts.”
CONSERVATORY
“I mean, in a sense it doesn’t matter so much, because they’re all dead. But it will set a precedent, and what’s to stop the council in a hundred years’ time from coming back to today and cutting my salary now?” she added.
Council launches adventurous budget scheme
Chief accountant at Nottingham County Council, William Whiffles, confirmed that around £1.5m of ratepayers’ money has been funnelled into research and development on the time machine that will be used to bring about the cuts. In testing, the machine has yet to go back in time, but Whiffles said he was confident that a working model would be ready soon.
BALLROOM
“We hope to have cracked the problem of time travel in time for the next Spending and Budgets Committee meeting at the start of the third quarter,” he told the Nottingham Clarion and Ocarina. “This scheme will have cost a lot of money, but when we get it to work it will pay for itself many times over,” he added.
STUDY
The technology involved in the ambitious programme is a closelyguarded secret, and no-one from the council was willing to give any information about how the time machine will eventually work. But reporters covering a recent planning meeting spotted Nottingham Mayor Ron Futter entering the Town Hall debating chamber wearing a rudimentary space suit with wires sticking out of it and all smoke coming off his hair.