For those of us already considerably underwhelmed by the prospect of a royal wedding, 2011 holds rather less glittering prospects. As I write this, the Local Government Association has announced that the New Year will herald 140,000 redundancies – 40% more than its original estimate.
The reason? This very ‘localist’ government’s very centralist decision to front-load the cuts, rather than distribute them evenly over the four years of the Comprehensive Spending Review. Councils will thus have to shave 11% off their budgets next year, and some will also have to cope with the loss of £450m worth of the Working Neighbourhoods Fund.
Even Conservative Baroness Margaret Eaton, chair of the LGA, is perturbed. Some losses, she complains, will be ‘dedicated professional posts that, given a choice, councils would not want to go’.
Let’s not worry too much then about the teaching assistants, street cleaners, housing benefit workers, care assistants and admin workers – the ones who have given faithful service for decades but who don’t qualify for the ‘professional’ title. They are already being ‘let go’ in droves, while £200m of government cash is made available to ‘help councils with the cost of cutting jobs’.
That’s madness economics, which the coalition will pay dearly for in 2011. Worried Liberal Democrat deputy leader Simon Hughes estimates that the damage might be nearer £3bn. Unison has worked out, for example, that depriving a £21,000-a-year council worker and single mother of her livelihood would cost the government around £19,000 in lost tax and National Insurance income and in benefits outlay.
Meanwhile, the local economy will suffer the loss of her and others’ purchasing power, making it even more of a struggle to pull itself out of the mire. And what will happen to those services going up in coalition smoke?
Some people say that care must be provided within the family – meaning that women care workers made redundant by councils will be expected to do for nothing what they are currently (poorly) paid for. Mass Suffolkisation will bring divestment of services – which will be miraculously taken up by local communities eager to join the Big Society.
Or will they? Polling by Ipsos Mori suggests that more than 70% of people think that other people should volunteer, but only a quarter are prepared to do so themselves. And willingness to ‘help out’ declines with income and is far less common in urban areas than rural communities.
This lack of enthusiasm for the Big Con is backed up by research by the Institute for Public Policy Research and PricewaterhouseCoopers, which shows that 90% of people believe that the state should remain responsible for providing public services. Those willing to chip in want to add value to state provision, rather than to run services themselves.
So will all this make us happier when April Fool’s Day 2011 has come and gone? We might not know now, but not to worry. In an act of supreme irony, David Cameron is going to measure our happiness in case we mistake our pleasure at the cuts for pain and worry. So that’ll be all right then.
Heather Wakefield is head of local government at Unison
