The local government finance settlement was published last month, but many councils have been planning for and making changes in preparation for their shrunken budgets since June 2010. So far the focus has been on how authorities can change their structures, reduce the number of departments and get better deals from their suppliers.
Shared services and joint chief officers have been considered by many, and rejected by some, but in all of this what role is there for local people and what benefit might their involvement bring to decision-making?
In Ipsos Mori’s most recent polls we have found a decline in agreement that public service efficiencies can save enough money to pay off the very high national debt we now have without damaging services. This implies a realisation that, even without knowledge of the context and detail, residents accept that Gershon-inspired changes over the past few years mean that there are few efficiency savings left to make. The remaining decisions are more about which services are of the highest priority and which can be ignored.
In our polling we have asked where the cuts should be made. And we have found that the public prioritises services for the most vulnerable.
This attitude could also be found in the public’s response to some of the propositions from October’s Comprehensive Spending Review. Three-quarters (73%) supported ending child benefit for those earning over £44,000 per year. Therefore the conclusion is that government support should be rationed for only the most in need. Similarly three-fifths (61%) supported a reduction in spending on welfare, such as benefits and jobseekers' allowance, by £7bn by 2015, and two-thirds (67%) supported the statement that benefits should only be provided for the people that need them most, not for the well-off.
So perhaps this is to be expected. People prioritise the most in need and adult and children’s services in particular. However, the method by which the questions are asked can help us to deepen our understanding of the broad statement ‘protect the vulnerable’. In our deliberative research with residents in specific local areas we found that when we started to discuss service provision and prospective cuts in detail four specific themes guided their decision-making.
* Whether standards can be retained
* An individual’s experience of a specific service
* Whether the public service is judged to be over-delivering
* Whether the impact of the withdrawal is deemed to be acceptable
If participants were satisfied that each of these aspects had been fulfilled they accepted that funding in this area could be reduced. However, if they felt that these criteria were not being met, then they wished that the level of funding be maintained. This is the crucial point, although in our quantitative polling people express their desire to preserve funding for services for the vulnerable, when you add local context and involve local people in the deliberative decision-making process their true priorities and trade offs emerge, allowing more informed decision-making.
The Localism Bill suggests that the Department for Communities and Local Government wishes to make the space at a local level for the community to step-up and help to shape their local area, whether that is by using the right to challenge or the right to buy. In our deliberative work with residents we have found that people do distinguish between the relative importance of a service to a local area and who is in charge of providing that service.
What is less clear is whether residents will have the capacity to use their new rights. The big question for local government is what they can do to enable residents to take advantage of these rights to ensure that the vulnerable do not suffer.
Kirstin Couper is associate director at Ipsos Mori
