By Richard Johnstone | 3 July 2014
Spending cuts being imposed on councils mean that the statutory duties placed on town halls will need to be revisited, delegates at the CIPFA conference have heard.
Addressing the conference in London yesterday, both Gavin Kelly, the chief executive of the Resolution Foundation think-tank, and Lord Danny Finkelstein, Conservative peer and executive editor of The Times, said a revision to what government does was required.
With the current deficit reduction plan only half way through, Kelly observed that ‘like the best World Cup games, I think the second half is going to be a lot livelier than the first half’.
He predicted that proposed cuts would most likely be offset by tax rises after the next election, but there was still going to be ‘deep cuts’. This meant duties placed on public bodies by central government would have to be examined.
‘In terms of the responsibilities that public bodies have, given the scale of what has to happen, then I think we are going to have to get into that world.
‘If you look at the Department for Communities and Local Government – not the local government settlement, but the rest of DCLG’s resource budget, is going to be about 70% smaller in 2015/16 than it was in 2010.
‘The idea that we don’t have to rethink the key responsibilities and duties that department has in that funding environment is a bit nuts.’
Finkelstein told delegates he shared the view that public spending would become an even bigger political issue in the next parliament.
‘One of the issues that will rise is the effectiveness of what the Americans call unfunded mandates [duties given to bodies by central government].
‘Unfunded mandates have risen because it’s a way of getting something off the national books, putting it on to the locals and getting someone else to solve the problem. I think there’s doubts of the practicability of that approach.’
In particular, he highlighted that government was launching new social programmes, such as the plan for free school meals for all children in infant schools in England and the cap on adult social care costs, set at £72,000 from 2016. These will be administered locally.
‘We have to take another serious look at what we do,’ he said. ‘Nothing has made me more depressed in the last two years than the idea of free school meals, adding a new social programme, whatever its advantages, at a time when we're trying to cope desperately with the cost of the social programmes we’ve got.
‘We’ve also got to the point of guaranteeing people’s social care insurance, which seems to me basically an inheritance insurance scheme for well-off people and I can’t understand why we would consider doing that at a time when we’ve got so little money.’
