WEST Devon Borough Council needs to do more to communicate clearly to the public ‘difficult decisions’ aimed at making the council financially watertight for the future, a councillor told its hub meeting last Tuesday.

Cllr Robert Oxborough was referring to the decision taken by the council’s Invest to Earn group to borrow millions of pounds to build a hotel on the Abbey Rise car park close to the centre of Tavistock.

Cllr Oxborough said the outcry provoked on social media by the news showed people were confused and thought that money saved from the controversial closing of toilets across the borough was being used to fund building the hotel.

‘Somebody commented how come the council hasn’t got the money for toilets but it has got the money to build a hotel,’ he said.

‘People seem to really value their public toilets and I know a lot are being transferred to parish councils and others are being closed. It has caused a lot of confusion and brings the council in for a lot of criticism.’

Speaking as councillors discussed plans to close four toilets in the borough to save £50,000 from the council budget for 2019/20, he added: ‘We need to be better at communicating these decisions that most of us don’t want to make but have to because of the situation we are in.’

Cllr Phil Sanders, leader of the council and the hub committee, who has spearheaded the plan, said the the hotel was a capital investment, using a loan from a local government funding pot, whereas the toilet closures were a saving from the council’s budget for the year from April.

Cllr Oxborough responded: ‘I’m aware of that but members of the public are not.’

Councillors are struggling to to balance the books for 2019/20 and beyond, when income from Central Government will be drastically reduced by more than £3-million pounds each year.

The hotel investment is intended, along with other commercial investments being made by the council outside the town, to bring in revenue to fund council services in the years ahead.

Cllr Oxborough, said, though, that all this was news to many of the borough’s residents.

‘It is time to educate the public about the reason we have to make these difficult decisions,’ he said. ‘The consequence of not doing them must be very clear to everyone.

‘We must make people aware why we are doing the projects on the table at the moment, which are causing great debate in Tavistock. We absolutely must make sure we close this funding gap in the future.’

As well as agreeing to borrow £10.631 million to fund the hotel and a ‘pod’ on the site of toilets and a taxi rank in Okehampton, the hub committee voted to allocate £468,700 of ‘Section 106’ money from housing developers together with £139,000 from the council’s affordable housing budget to build ten flats for temporary accommodation for homeless people in the town.

The hub committee meeting at Kilworthy Park heard that there was an urgent need to provide housing for people in emergency B & B accommodation.