Further cuts, alongside political posturing, mean a difficult year ahead
The RSN and Rural Community Councils are a bulwark against further public sector cuts lets hope this year notwithstanding the pressures they both face as indicated in the introduction these are currently very severe for RCCs that they both retain the capacity to fight the worst implications of the cuts trailed in this article for rural communities. This story tells us:
By any standard, 2015 is likely to be a watershed year for UK public managers. There are a number of hazards that can’t be easily avoided. A lack of money, coupled with the likely behaviour of politicians in the runup to an election, threatens to seriously undermine public managers’ roles and to jeopardise their reputation.
Public finances are not stable. All the parties know that significant savings are required to get the UK back to a fiscal equilibrium following the unique shift in government debt to bail out financial services. We are approximately a third of the way through a decade of cuts. As the economy recovers, every 1% increase in interest rates will add £8bn to the annual bill of £100bn for debt payments, which dwarfs many departmental budgets and sees annual debt charges approaching the NHS budget in scale.
For the public managers making savings, the discretionary funding taps were switched off long ago. So the difficult job is to withdraw or remodel remaining services even though there is a statutory duty to provide them. For this to be done well and sustainably takes time and involves significant engagement with service users. The scale of savings and service transformation is itself a major project and public managers are often not given time to plan in an appropriate way.