AN ELECTED mayor like London’s Boris Johnson or Ken Livingstone could be the only hope of slashing millions of wasted pounds from Bournemouth’s council budgets.

That’s the claim from a former councillor who says he spent years “banging his head against the wall” when he was in charge of the authority’s coffers.

Liberal Democrat Adrian Fudge says council officers are so resistant to cuts that efforts to clamp down on spending often hit the buffers.

He said officers who were asked to chop their budgets would usually produce a list of possible cuts which would be unacceptable to the public. Councillors would then relent and let them overspend, argued Mr Fudge.

“You could save millions of pounds in the Town Hall by getting the organisation working efficiently if somebody had the power to do it and members have not got that power,” he said.

“You can try the best but at the end of the day if a chief officer doesn’t really want to do it, they won’t do it.

“This is why we need elected mayors, who are in fact elected chief executives.”

He said of his time as deputy leader of the council: “I thought we did reasonably well in cutting down the budget over those years but you’re very much banging your head against a brick wall all the time.”

Mr Fudge said that consultants had previously said £4-5 million could be saved from administration, but a procurement officer was hired who only ended up saving £500,000.

He claimed a “huge” saving could be made if officers cut 25 per cent of their meetings.

And he said the council’s public relations operation had mushroomed. “You could cut out £1 million a year if you cut out all this self-promotion.

“There’s millions of pounds there to be saved in getting rid of jobs that do not provide a service to the public,” he said.

But the council’s current deputy leader, Conservative Cllr John Beesley, said he did not recognise the picture painted by Mr Fudge.

He said the current administration had saved £11.2 million in its first three years and would save £8 million this year and another £8m the next.

He said members of the council’s cabinet were involved daily in the detail of departmental finances.

“The fundamental work is done by those portfolio holders and each and every one of them is engaged in the job that they’ve been given,” he added.