The post-budget discussion has rightly focused on the deficit, borrowing and growth. Talk of more cuts just around the corner has largely been lost, even though those cuts (or tax rises) are potentially enormous. No area of public service has been – and will be – hit as hard as local government.
By 2014, councils will have seen their funding cut by around a third, while central government departments have agreed cuts of only eight per cent. Further cuts after the election will see local government funding halved between 2011 and 2018. Budget reductions on this scale don’t just stop councils doing some things that they used to do – they fundamentally change the nature of what councils are.
Yet while local government is almost being hacked out of all recognition, the very ministers who preach more discipline for others don’t seem so keen to accept it for their own departments. In the last quarter, 32,000 local government employees lost their jobs at the same time as central government departments grew by 11,000. This is a question of priorities. It’s less a question of whether we should cut, and more a question of where should the cuts fall? The government’s answer is not fair and not sustainable.
Some will shrug their shoulders at the slow death of their councils and say ‘so what?’ Nobody loves the local government of planning officers, parking tickets and council tax. But witness the outpouring of angst whenever a library is closed – it seems that people quite like libraries. And have a look at the response whenever a council (thankfully very rarely) fails a vulnerable child – that seems quite important as well. The trouble for the shoulder-shruggers is that cuts of 50 per cent don’t leave much money for those cherished libraries. And you can, depressingly, be sure that more children will be put at risk in such a climate.
I am part of a council cabinet that has passed three consecutive balanced budgets, so some may damn me as a hypocrite. They’re wrong. Those budgets, and those of all Labour authorities, don’t show that we agreed with the government’s priorities; they show that we believe that our priorities are better than the government’s. Had we played to the SWP gallery, the government would have determined not only the total level of our spending, but also every target of our spending. Our priorities would have been their priorities. By accepting their straitjacket, we gave our priorities as much freedom as they could get.
So while councils do have to take their fair share of the cuts, the government’s approach is more likely to lead to chaos than to the innovation with which councils will be able to do more with less. Because innovation can happen only if councils are given freedom – to succeed and to fail. Being told how to innovate is not innovation – but tell that to Eric Pickles. Rather than fighting his department’s corner, he has limited himself to weekly press releases on everything from bin collections, to council newspapers, to telling local authorities that they can duck the cuts by opening pop-up cafes in town halls.
Whatever happened to Pickles when he was leader of Bradford council, it can’t have been pleasant. It has given him a deep mistrust, even hatred, of local government. The trouble for Labour councils is that this mistrust is also held by some of our MPs. In government, we never trusted councils to decide how their money should be spent, preferring to hand over hundreds of small pots of funds for individual projects, rather than one bucket-load. We never allowed councils real say over where they raised their money.
At its heart, this is about a lack of trust of voters. The Doubting Thomases see voters as an unsophisticated lot, unable to distinguish between different parts of government. They think that a council failure will always be seen as a failure of the government. I just don’t buy this. Look at the way that people vote tactically. Look at the way that people split their tickets across different elections. Plenty of voters in places like Barnet last year were easily able to vote both for Boris Johnson and for Andrew Dismore, the Labour London assembly candidate. If they can do that, they are more than capable of distinguishing between the government and their council.
Labour should trust their voters and trust their councils. Give them the freedom to innovate, to save money while delivering better services, and to decide which services they are going to provide. Innovation is the only way to deliver libraries and child protection, while taking a fair share of cuts –you just can’t salami-slice away 50 per cent of your budget. Without that trust, those unloved but indispensible councils will simply wither away. And you’ll miss us when we’re gone.
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Mark Rusling is a Labour and Cooperative councillor in the London borough of Waltham Forest and writes the Changing to Survive column
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Bradford Council was always just a stepping stone in the career of the “Fat Controller”. Now he has partnered up with his “soul mate”, Brandon, he is allowed create a system of Local Government as the antithesis of his own image i.e. small with no power. His obsession with minutiae demonstrates his lack of understanding of the reality of local government, he is the perfect example of a Politician who has started believing his own rhetoric.
As the article rightly points out though, his views are not un-typical of MPs, of all parties. A view brought about to some degree by their realisation that the majority of them are little more than voting fodder, who unlike active Local Councillors, have little influence over anything.