The end of local government?
“Who ate all the pies?” – someone has eaten up all the funding for local Government, this thought provoking piece in the Guardian suggests the gravy may be running down Mr Pickle’s chin!! It tells us that those councillors who listened to Eric Pickles at the recent Tory party conference in Birmingham:
“are now deep into the process of making brutal, unprecedented cuts. The figures are staggering: £600m must be taken out of Birmingham city council’s budget alone by 2017. As historian and Labour MP Tristram Hunt pointed out, the cuts put at grave risk the “heroic, civilising function of local government”.
Birmingham leader, Sir Albert Bore, called it the “end of local government as we know it”. Barnsley councillor Tim Cheetham agrees. He believes councils are planning their own demise. By 2019, says Cheetham, adult social care costs going inexorably up will meet reducing council budgets coming inexorably down. “From that point on councils will be doing nothing else. There will no longer be a local authority,” he predicts.
This may sound over-dramatic, but local authorities really do have very little room for manoeuvre. Simply cutting existing services will no longer do. A guide to commissioning services published by the Society of Local Authority Chief Executives and Senior Managers (Solace) acknowledges this in the guide’s title: “When the salami’s gone”.
I normally pull out the implications of a generic story for rural authorities. I don’t think there is a need to put any special spin on this tale – its implications for rural services are clear. Lest I be accued of taking political sides Solace is a non political body!