Council services, including elderly care, children centres, parks and libraries, have suffered desperately under the weight of the previous government’s spending cuts, which amounted to an £18bn cull in real terms since 2010.
But local authorities’ pain is far from over after the Chancellor’s autumn statement revealed they will continue to bear austerity’s greatest burden.
The central government grant – the primary source of local authority funding – will be phased out by 2020, leaving local councils facing a gaping black hole of millions.
The Chancellor contends that the shortfall will be made up by new measures that will devolve power to local government, representing what George Osborne calls a “revolution in the way we govern this country”. These measures include allowing local authorities to control and keep 100 per cent of receipts from business rates and property sales, as well as allowing councils to raise their council tax to fund social care. Surely, this is a red herring, and will go nowhere near to replacing the lost funding, especially for the most deprived communities.
If you look at the argument about business rates, the impact will be very detrimental for the poorer areas. Of course, those that will benefit from business rates will be areas that are already quite affluent.
Recently, leader of Lincs County Council, Martin Hill was reported to have made reference to people living longer and the cost of looking after the elderly was
a strain on resources. These people have worked hard and they have paid into the system for decades, of course they deserve a long retirement and a right to be looked after.
But there is even a larger picture nationally, with dark days ahead as we see a rise in homelessness as housing costs go up. But if social care does collapse, then there is even a bigger strain on our NHS. It has to be far more expensive for the elderly and the vulnerable to be looked after by the NHS than it is by local government.
We have already seen the attack on our leisure centres, libraries and youth services, because they are seen as not essential by our Conservative council. This has to go down as false economy. If you don’t invest in youth services, then some other budget will have to pick up the tab and there are bound to be repercussions. Another example of cuts not working, councils outsourcing services results in a transformation of councils becoming commissioners of services instead of providers.
When councils become nothing more than facilitators of private contracts, services suffer because companies are only interested in their shareholders, not the communities that they serve. This can be seen clearly by the horrific failures of SERCO in our county education services.
Despite these painful cuts by central government local councils will still have to make decisions and much can be done locally to combat these cuts.
As a community we can have our say, stand together and fight these cuts by challenging these local decisions. With our county council declaring “We’re facing financial crisis”, confirming it needs to make savings of £170m over the next four years, they cannot guarantee to deliver some of the basic frontline services.
The situation is shambolic, elected representatives are gambling with our own money and asking us, what shall we throw away next?
Rodney Sadd
Vice Chair, CLP, South Holland & The Deepings
