Cuts to the third sector

The scale of spending reductions to local government and the way they are front-loaded means not only cuts to frontline services but also cuts to whatever can easily yield immediate savings in time for the 2011/12 financial year.
This is almost certainly neither sensible nor strategic but, in the short timeframe between the grant settlement in December and the new year in April, there is little else.
Inevitably, the voluntary sector has been hit, but some of these groups seem to live in another world where the budget deficit passes them by, leaving their funding untouched. They are part of the public sector and the public sector is being cut, irrespective of fairness. As The MJ’s front page story shows, cutting all managers’ salaries and back offices would still not avoid the need to cut frontline services.
However, local authorities operate in a political climate, and cuts to voluntary sector funding are doing them no favours whatsoever in the corridors of Westminster. Such cuts – some of them clumsy – have severely embarrassed the Government by turning Big Society into an apparent sham. Ministers do not like being left with egg on their faces.
In his address to the voluntary sector, Mr Pickles this week reflected this fury at local government by warning he would use unspecified powers to force them to stop making ‘disproportionate’ cuts to voluntary groups.
Much more ominous was his comment that councils would be judged on their relationship with their local voluntary sector, ‘a key test of whether councils are ready for independent, responsible leadership.’ In other words, like many secretaries of state before him, Mr Pickles is discovering that councils have an irritating habit of doing their own thing, irrespective of government policy and that maybe, after all, centralism has its advantages.
The voluntary sector has a key long-term role earmarked in local service delivery, irrespective of the cuts. Mr Pickles’ view that localism means councils passing on powers to the third sector will have been only increased by the recent Big Society cuts row.
Councils have often had little choice in cutting grants to voluntary groups. But in a harsh political climate, the damage has been as much to their own reputation and lobbying power as to the third sector.