On Wednesday night, the 10 o’clock news ran a feature comparing the impact of budget cuts on East Dorset and a London Borough.

The first thing to note is that representatives from both councils didn’t get drawn into a “beggar my neighbour” discussion justifying their own position whilst criticising the other and I thought that was a dignified way to tackle things.

The second thing to note is that I never previously thought that the inequities of the spending formulae for local government – the staple fare of the Rural Services Network – would make popular news in this way and the thing was really well presented.

It set out in a nutshell what we know – many rural authorities rely heavily on council tax rather than government grants to fund their activities. In this scenario with the current cuts being mainly linked to government expenditure those authorities with significant government grants are being hit very heavily and those with a greater reliance on their own “tax base” are proportionately slightly less affected.

Let’s hope viewers didn’t assume it was all “milk and honey” in rural England compared to the tough old world of “the smoke”. What it does emphasise is that rural and urban authorities do have different contexts and that the current way their funding works which treats them as broadly the same apart from their levels of deprivation doesn’t work very well.

It also causes me to reflect on the opportunities linked to the proposals in the Localism Bill about giving authorities the opportunity to control their destinies more through more flexibility over managing their own tax base.