The scale of the cutbacks bearing down on local government are becoming clear. Two new reports suggest ways for the workforce and communities to limit the impact
At the Local Government Association conference which opens this week, UNISON will be launching a new report produced jointly with the Centre for Local Economic Strategies: ‘The Cuts – UK’s Damaged Future’.
Shadow local government minister Jack Dromey and deputy leader of the LGA , Sharon Taylor, will be joining CLES chief executive Neil McInroy and I in a debate on Wednesday on what the coalition’s massive swipe at local government means for UK society - and what role councils should play in re-building it after the electorate takes a massive swipe at the coalition.
Of course the LGA conference also comes a week after the chancellor topped an average 26% cut in council funding since 2010 with a further 10% reduction, praising DCLG secretary of state Pickles as a ‘model of lean (sic) government’ as he carved away.
Of the total £60 billion of public expenditure taken out of public services and the economy so far by the coalition, local government has taken by far the biggest hit. In that context, last week’s public admonishment of CLG by the Public Accounts Committee and the National Audit Office for exceeding its cash and capital spending limits provides little comfort in the face of the further devastation to come.
Alongside the cuts report, UNISON will be highlighting a series of guides to resisting demonstrably costly and ineffective privatisations, and three well-researched reports in our series entitled ‘The Damage’. These reports show just how far austerity is undermining critical front line local government services like libraries, but also less obvious ones like environmental health and trading standards – the invisible and protective hand of local government that ensures everything from freedom from noisy neighbours to danger-free food and the safety of children’s toys.
Local services that are preventative, provide assurance to local people and lay the basis for caring, safe, educated and cohesive communities of the future are being cruelly and surely dismantled. The next reports in the series – youth services and home care - will bear the same message. That such cuts are incubating great social and personal damage for the future is more than obvious.
Of course, the uneven nature of austerity measures and the rationale for DCLG funding settlements since 2010 have been the subject of scrutiny and criticism by both the Public Accounts Committee and the National Audit Office. As the NAO concludes, there seems to have been no analysis by DCLG of the demand or cost of council services, while the PAC has said that, ‘It is virtually impossible to follow the line between calculated needs and formula funding’.
Steve Freer, chief executive of CIPFA, concludes that ‘without more effective analysis and modelling there is a danger that funding reductions are made on a “hit and miss” basis and that potentially dire implications for local communities and service users are not understood until the damage is done'.
Let’s leave aside for one moment why the coalition parties should want to erode their political base in local communities and punish their most vulnerable inhabitants for a financial crisis not at all of their making and take a look instead at the key findings of ‘The Cuts’. Based on earlier local studies on the impact of austerity measures in Nottinghamshire, Suffolk and elsewhere by CLES for UNISON, the report draws some devastating conclusions.
The main one is clear: The cuts are not just having a devastating impact on local people and local economies now, they have inflicted ‘irreversible damage…fundamentally restructuring UK society for the future, changing the lives of local people and local economies’ and the very heart of the UK itself.
And their impact is uneven. Despite the coalition’s 2010 White Paper on Local Growth which recognised the need for spatially sensitive policy-making, the report highlights the inequality of the cuts. Deprived areas like Liverpool and one-time mining communities are the hardest hit, while leafy Tory heartlands like Surrey, Windsor and West Oxfordshire escape relatively unscathed. There is political bias and ideology aplenty in the coalition’s local government settlements.
Our cuts report also highlights the fact that at the time of writing, a breath-taking 380,000 jobs had been deleted from councils – a figure now exceeding 400,000 and rising by the day. Women – as 77% of the local government workforce – have been hardest hit as workers and service users. The combined multiplier effects of job loss, pay cuts and reduced council spend are shocking.
Local government workers are the most likely of any group to live and work in the same area, so redundancies will impact heavily on the local economy – as will the 18% cut in basic pay and myriad additional local attacks on pay-related conditions experienced since 2010. Cuts in local council spend will run deep too.
CLES has demonstrated that for every £1 invested by the neighbourhood environment and land services teams in West Lothian, 71 pence is re-spent in the local area. Those figures can be repeated across councils.
So what is the alternative? ‘The Cuts’ does not aim to deal with the macro response to that question but looks at the critical role of local government in securing all of our futures. It calls for a halt to ‘this unravelling of local capacity’ and calls for councils to be ‘at the centre of facilitating and brokering networks, collaborating and connecting across all sectors within a place’.
The promotion of in-sourcing to extract maximum value from public money is also recommended, alongside a more spatially sensitive approach to funding. It calls for a Living Wage as the minimum pay for all local government workers and contracted-out staff to save government spend on benefits and boost local economies.
Plus, a more thought through and focussed industrial strategy - and last, but not least, more engaged unions and workforce involvement in service improvement.
