Planning for the long term

This week’s attack by the right-of-centre think-tank, the Centre for Social Justice on chancellor George Osborne’s spending cuts for taking a ‘blunderbuss’ approach has resonance across local government.
The centre claims the temptation by Whitehall is to cut the easy targets, however effective they are and however many savings they deliver long term, leaving the more difficult but often inefficient programmes in place.
Another often-used phrase is for central and local government, when facing stringent cuts, to ‘go for the low-hanging fruit’. This is a euphemism for cutting area grants to community projects, dropping non-statutory services, squeezing the voluntary sector, postponing road maintenance, or as we have seen this week in Oxfordshire, slashing road safety initiatives, closing branch libraries, indeed, shutting any projects which yield quick savings with minimal upheaval. Most of them have a direct effect on the public, if in varying degrees.
If cuts are carried out in an atmosphere of panic and with no strategic rationale, then the result will be waves of negative local media, disgruntled residents and a council which has trimmed its services but remained largely intact as an organisation.
To complicate the cuts agenda, the public sector is also under pressure not to incur big, upfront redundancy costs. One chief executive recently told me: ‘I need to scale down the department but the redundancy costs mean I wouldn’t get any payback for three years, so there’s no point in doing it.’ The public will take a dim view of councils slashing services on the one hand but maintaining tiers of middle managers because they cannot afford to let them go.
The more far-sighted councils are already looking at the longer-term picture. Short-term cuts become longer-term ‘decommissioning.’ Councillors bury their territorial differences, such as the innovative tie-up between Northamptonshire and Cambridgeshire, to deliver savings, districts share their management teams, and who knows, one day even their councillors.
What councils must not do, as they prepare to take on wider responsibilities across the public sector, is to destroy their credibility among their residents by cutting the low-hanging fruit and avoiding the more difficult – and more long-term – organisational changes necessary to cope with the next four years