Business goes on as the cuts bite

The tragic story of Riven Vincent, the mother of a severely-disabled child who told the website Mumsnet last week that she could no longer cope, drew attention to at least two fundamental issues other than her own personal circumstances.
The first was that the media onslaught was aimed squarely at the prime minister rather than the mother’s local authority, even though, technically, it was the latter’s responsibility. Indeed, the media rather buried the local authority angle since it muddied their line that it was David Cameron’s fault for promising to protect disability care services – when he met the mother during the election – and then not delivering.
This sets an uncomfortable precedent for the coalition which has striven, so far, to devolve the decision-making and the odium about cuts to councils. For while there will be many more tragic individual cases blame for their predicament looks set to be laid at the door of Number 10, not the civic centre.
Second, the case of Ms Vincent reminded the public of the huge and rising bill for children’s services, and the difficulty of containing costs, let alone reducing them, despite swingeing budget cuts.
It is appalling that families with severely-disabled children – already victims – find themselves further victimised through spending cuts. Nor will Ofsted allow any reduction in safeguarding services after the Baby Peter case.
So, what does it imply? As one county chief executive said to me: ‘When it comes to closing a branch library or protecting child safeguarding services, of course, I’ll do the latter.’ Another said to me: ‘As a county, we will become little more than an agency for safeguarding vulnerable children and adults.’ Recent council budgets announced for 2011 show them making strenuous efforts to maintain children’s services budgets or, in some cases, increase them.
The public, however, remain generally ignorant of how much of their council’s budget is swallowed up by children’s – and adult care – services. All they see are their favourite local amenities being cut from parks to libraries to community centre grants. The tragic case of Ms Vincent should focus the minds of national politicians on how children’s services can be adequately funded without laying waste to all other council services.

Business goes on as the cuts bite

It is right that the LGA should be bolshy about the financial settlement for local government. The sector has been stuffed, and as the full impact of the settlement percolates through departmental budgets, the reality is worse than it first appeared.
Even in the past few days on the circuit, all the chief executives can talk about is how many redundancies they are conducting and whether the first year cuts are 10%, 20% – or, as two district chiefs told me this week, 40%.
PM David Cameron’s speech to the RSA this week maintaining that public spending would be the same as 2006 earned a riposte from one district chief to me that in his council’s case, the 2011 budget took it back to 1997.
Meanwhile, because councils always do what they are told, business has to go on. So, for example, this week, SOLACE’s annual election conference was packed with anxious chiefs, because on 5 May, there is the perfect storm of not only elections in 280 English councils, but polls for the parliament in Scotland, assemblies in Wales and Northern Ireland, four mayoral elections and last, but definitely not least, the UK-wide referendum for a new voting system (subject to legislation passing).
All of this is the responsibility of council chief executives and electoral administrators, none of whom can afford any more repeats of queues at polling booths, as happened last May.
Even although turnout for the referendum is expected to be 30%, there is still the risk of students deliberately causing chaos by turning up en masse to polling stations 10 minutes before they close as part of their tuition fees protests.
Admittedly, the Government, conscious of budget cuts, is ensuring the elections are fully funded and, despite slashing public spending, is managing to find some £54m in the otherwise-empty Treasury cupboard to cover council referendum costs.
Even assuming the costs are met, councils are still grappling with severe budget cuts and reduced staffing levels, and need the headache of the referendum like a hole in the head.
But then, getting on with whatever they are asked to do in whatever circumstances and with whatever financial constrains is what councils do and what, it appears, governments expect them to do. For how long is another question.

The smear campaign against councils

It was inevitable that a row about whose responsibility it is for service cuts – local or central government – would surface, once the full implication of last month’s settlement on individual budgets was clear.
It was also obvious the dark arts of media spinning would come into play.
The coalition’s approach is to pass the buck to local government under the guise of localism. So all cuts are, therefore, a local issue, and ministers are mere bystanders who have devolved powers and can, therefore, not be blamed for what ensues. Fair enough. Councils back localism, accept they are having to shoulder a large burden of deficit-reduction, and agree it is up to them how they make difficult decisions about priorities.
However, it is not unreasonable to ask that ministers, in turn, practice what they preach on localism. It would even be nice to hear some praise from time to time, considering the reductions councils are being expected to bear.
In fact, what we have been seeing in the past few weeks is a drip-drip trashing of the sector through selected sympathetic media. The latest example was in a Sunday newspaper last weekend, suggesting that councils were hiking fees and charges – or what it called ‘stealth taxes’ – to pay for managers’ salaries and pensions. This followed ministerial claims that rubbish was not being collected for as much as a month over Christmas, which was hotly denied by the LGA. Then there was the usual assault on senior salaries, with ministerial complaints that only a handful of chiefs had taken pay cuts.
Personally, I believe raising fees and charges well above inflation is a bad idea for councils, poisoning relations with residents and yielding diminishing returns as it meets consumer resistance. But that is their choice. It certainly hasn’t stopped the train operators, Transport for London, energy utilities, credit card issuers, oil companies, and the chancellor from whacking above-inflation rises on the public.
Ministers should make a New Year’s resolution to let local authorities decide their own priorities – rightly or wrongly – and accept councils are grappling with the biggest funding cuts in decades, and could do with the occasional word of encouragement.