The strange death of local government - a comment on setting budgets (and what we do)

‘No new money from central government is being provided to councils in 2017/18. In fact, more than two thirds of councils will actually be worse off next year than they were expecting.'

You will have heard this sort of observation many times over many years. This version is from the current chairman of the Local Government Association (LGA), Lord Porter. The problem is that, while I think Lord Porter is right, over the years the repeated cries of pain from local government have destroyed much of our credibility on this matter - there may now be a wolf but nobody believes us.

That Night a Fire did break out--
You should have heard Matilda Shout!
You should have heard her Scream and Bawl,
And throw the window up and call
To People passing in the Street--
(The rapidly increasing Heat
Encouraging her to obtain
Their confidence) -- but all in vain!
For every time she shouted 'Fire!'
They only answered 'Little Liar!'
And therefore when her Aunt returned,
Matilda, and the House, were Burned.

Or in less poetic terms:

"Surrey County Council should hang their heads in shame.

"Surrey residents will have seen their council tax go up by around 85 per cent in the last two decades and have every right to feel that their local representatives have let them down once again."

So says the Taxpayers Alliance as it argues how paying councillors, high salaries for top officials and trips to conferences show there's no need for tax increases. After all, local government always says this:

"After years of striving to keep council tax as low as possible or frozen, many town halls have found themselves having to ask residents to pay more council tax ..."

That's Cllr Claire Kober, leader of Camden and chair of the LGA's resources board.

So is there any truth in all this? Are local councils being stripped bare as the easiest target for national government demanded austerity or is there still largess, waste and unnecessary expense out there in local government land?

I can't really comment on Surrey or indeed any local council other than my own, Bradford. Here's the state of our budget:



For the sake of precision, this is the 2016/17 revenue budget, third quarter report (taken from the papers for a Corporate Overview and Scrutiny meeting on 2 February 2017). What it shows is that Bradford Council's net expenditure for 2016/17 is £378m and gross expenditure is £1,230m (net expenditure being that gross figure less income). This is, for us mere mortals, a lot of money and most of it - including most of the income - is public money.

You will appreciate how, given the scale of the money we spend, saving a hundred thousand or so on paying councillors, senior officials or trade union reps isn't likely to fix the problem (assuming - see above - we accept there is a problem). And nor is this where we're spending the money. I'm going to focus on the unfunded part of the table above - the 'net budget' figure of £378m. This is funded from two sources - local taxes (council tax and, at some point, business rates) and Revenue Support Grant (RSG). When you hear about cuts to local budgets what is being talked about is reduction in RSG. It is the stated intention of the government to reduce this grant to zero - it is currently around £138m in Bradford. Some local authorities in England already have no RSG - the government cannot cut the budget of, for example, Sevenoaks District in Kent because they no longer give it any grant.

But enough of where the money comes from what about how its spent. Were I to ask an average Bingley Rural resident to tell me how much is spent on highways and how much on social care, I'd probably get similar numbers. The reality here is that we spend around ten times as much on social care as we do on highways. Look at that table above and you'll see that the net budget for adults' and children's care amounts to £207.8m out of that £378m net budget - that's 55% of the total net budget and over 70% of the money we spend on delivering services. Yet these are, in the main, hidden services that only the individual recipients know about.

In the budget planning papers for 2017/18 Bradford's finance director reports that, in terms of delivering care, we plan to spend £158m in the forthcoming year (note this is a different definition and calculation from the table above). And this will support 6,200 vulnerable people at a cost in excess of £25,000 per person. Oh, before you call this a scandalous waste recognise that this represents £480 per week in a world where average weekly cost in a care home (not a nursing home) is, according to Which, £600. And this hides significant cross-subsidy:

According to the healthcare market intelligence provider LaingBuisson, residential care homes in England currently need to charge fees of between £590 and £648 per week.

However, the average fee paid by English councils for residential care of older people was just £486 per week in 2016/17.

LaingBuisson estimates this means residents who pay from their own finances are filling a funding gap of £1.3bn a year.

What we're seeing in top tier local government is its gradual decline from being a maker of place into being the funder of care for vulnerable people. For county councils this is even clearer as they don't provide services such as refuse collection, leisure services, housing and economic development that metropolitan districts like Bradford provide. I'm guessing that the proportion of county budgets spent on providing care is touching 70%.

Linked to this shift in local government priority is a secondary truth - we really have very little control over these budgets. With adult care the entitlement to care is set out in law and local authorities have a duty to provide (or enable provision of) that care. If an older or disabled person - and there are growing populations in both areas - qualifies, the council has to provide and has to pay. For children we have a little more flexibility but most councils rightly seek to avoid increasing the risks and government retains (and exercises) the power to intervene and direct decisions in children's services.

This strange death of local government belies the scale of our spending and the importance (or even self-importance) of councillors. The sad reality for many councillors is that their local parish or town council has more flexibility in decision-making than does the grand top tier council with its fine offices, highly paid officials and more-or-less full time councillors. None of this is a criticism of local councils or councillors but rather a recognition - something even the TPA recognises in its more measured moments - that most of the financial challenges facing local councils point back to national government where, despite all the rhetoric, local councillors are largely seen by officials as bumbling fools that get in the way.

I remember a grumpy old Labour councillor in Bradford called Syd Collard who, on the minibus to some planning committee site visit, went on at length about how being a councillor was a waste of time these days and he wouldn't recommend it to anyone any more. My Dad - a councillor for 35 years - says much the same. Wherever we look and regardless of national government cant about localism our ability to make local decisions about local services to local people are constrained by the interference of government regulations and the prejudices of the 'Man in Whitehall'.

I'm sure Syd and my Dad would agree that local government is important. But right now local councils - the top tier ones at least - are in danger of becoming merely the agents of care delivery for a combination of the NHS and national government departments. Without belittling care as a service, this isn't what we need and reminds me daily how the stupidity of the poll tax and the arrogance of ministers since resulted in the emasculation of local councillors - a gentling enacted in law by Blair's 2000 Local Government Act that left most of us sitting on the backbench being 'community leaders' rather than doing what people think they elected us to do.

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Bradford and The Cuts

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There are some useful figures here about the actual changes to Bradford Council's budget since 2007/8 on the Conservative Group blog. It concludes with this paragraph which rather sums it up:

The truth is that Bradford Council has faced significant reductions in grants and that, outside the protected areas of education and public health, this has had quite an impact on service provision. However, we can find over £500,000 for union officials and their perks, can spend nearly £5m on ‘strategic support’ and can willfully turn down government grants so as to make a political point about council tax. This isn’t the sign of an organisation in crisis but of one that is only just getting to grips with waste and excess.

Do have a read of the whole piece.

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Why I'm confused about those cuts...

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"Major cuts," is the cry. And I wonder. Mostly where the money is all going. For in the aggregate there are no cuts:

What’s more, the evidence indicates that U.K. has, at best, slowed down the growth of spending, but it has not engaged in actual spending cuts. I documented the trend in British spending earlier this year:

A look at the data in Her Majesty’s Fiscal Year 2012 Budget shows (see table 2.3) that total managed expenditures will increase from £696.4 billion in 2011–2012 to £733.5 billion in 2014–2015, and further to £756.3 billion in 2016–2017. Adjusted for population growth, this is slow growth, but not a savage cut. That table also shows a “projected” drop in Public Sector Gross Investment between 2012–2013, but if it ever materializes, it will be contained to that year alone.

And we're paying through the nose too:

Spending cuts in the UK can’t be blamed for the weak growth path the country is on. On the other hand, tax increases can. Here is a list:

• a VAT hike from 17.5 percent to 20 percent (probably the main culprit of the U.K.’s current problems)
• a new 50 percent tax bracket on incomes over £150,000, which will drop to 45 percent next year
• an increase in air-passenger duty to 8 percent
• “temporary” payroll tax of 50 percent on bonuses over £25,000
• a capital-gains tax hike
• a 0.088 percent levy on banks
• an increase to 7 percent in the stamp duty on the sale of properties worth more than £2 million and on properties bought through “non-natural persons.”

(For more, go here.) The bottom line is that the U.K. is another case of private-sector austerity (i.e., tax hikes) without public-sector austerity (i.e., spending cuts).

To paraphrase Ray Davies, I remain, yours truly...

...confused BD13.

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Local Councils increase reserves (what was that about cuts?)

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The LGA is weeping crocodile tears about Council's using reserves to manage the process of budget reductions (we should really call it 'rebasing' but that is rather too much of a jargon term for little old me). Apparently prudent local councils (who have stashed away £17 billion for a range of rainy days) will run out of money if the "cuts" continue:

...the LGA has said that the £17bn saved in cash reserves by the most prudent authorities will be used up in five years time if employed for the management of Government austerity measures. 

Of course a council may choose to use some of its reserves to extend the period over which the budget is reduced from its current base to a new base. This allows for fewer redundancies, gives space for effective service redesign and allows for the impact of any service reductions to be ameliorated. It is - in a period of savings - good budget management. Which explains of course why Bradford's Labour leadership has chosen to keep the reserves and cut the services. I call it the machismo of cuts.

But the LGA then comes up with a whining little reason why Council's shouldn't spend reserves:

This will leave councils without funds to invest in growth promoting infrastructure projects or support any further financial risks...

Pretty scary! Especially when we see the actual situation - what has really happened to reserves during this period of massive budget cuts:

Over last year, town halls outside of the capital were found to have added £2bn to their reserves, while authorities within the Greater London Authority furthered their reserves by £0.6bn. 

So it seems that, during a period of severe budget cuts, local councils have managed to squirrel away yet more cash for ill-defined and often unspecified future purposes - "strategic revenue reserves" and "change programme funds" abound providing senior officers and politicians with handy little slush funds to bung at preferred schemes and vote-buying campaigns. 

But the boss of the LGA - a Tory for heaven's sake - still bleats on about how this is all terrible:

'Councils are working extremely hard to shield frontline services from the 28% cut to the money they receive from Government. But cash reserves can only dampen the impact, not fill the gap. If councils plundered their reserves to cover the cuts, the cupboard would be bare within five years and there would be nothing left to invest in the growth promoting projects Britain desperately needs.’

So tell me Cllr Cockell, why aren't councils investing in these 'growth promoting projects' now? Why are councils continuing to hoard cash - Bradford has over £170 million, Manchester getting on for £250 million - against some proverbial rainy day? What are revenue reserves for if it's not to allow effective restructuring and the proper management of a reducing budget?

This is just special pleading - I would say ignorance but I simply don't believe that the leadership of the LGA are ignorant. This is deliberate wibble, an attempt to wangle a little more cash out of the government this autumn. That is all.

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Police, crime and public honesty - a statistical lesson

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It is pretty clear that rates of crime don’t correspond to any of things we’re always calling for – more coppers (on the beat of course), tougher sentencing, bigger prisons, capital punishment or flogging in the public square.

Recorded crime...fell by 4%, continuing the long downward trend in crime since 1995, and dropping below 4m offences for the first time in 23 years.

The Office for National Statistics (ONS) said violent crime had fallen by 7%, including a 2% fall in robberies.

We’d also been told – mostly by chief constables protecting their empires – that reductions in police spending during a recession would result in a surge of crime:

Acting Chief Constable Chris Weigh of the Lancashire force said the loss of front line officers had resulted in an “inevitable” increase in the number of offences being committed.

Seems this top copper was wrong! The real problem is that – because we’ve focused on police, punishment, prisons and probation – we don’t really understand why crime has fallen so rapidly over the past 20 years. Or indeed whether it will continue to fall. What we will be able to say is that the overall funding of policing and economic recession does not lead to more crime.

So what are those factors? Well it seems that simple economics is a factor – stealing stuff is harder and selling it on is more difficult (as well as less lucrative). So professional thieves have shifted to other crimes:

...with significant rises recorded in the last two years in metal thefts triggered by soaring commodity prices

While the opportunist has taken to nicking bikes and lawnmowers from sheds.

However, the truth may be that we’re really a lot more honest than the authorities give us credit:

Mobile phones deliberately left in pubs and clubs by Sussex Police to catch thieves were all returned.
 

Officers planted phones fitted with tracking devices in nine clubs and pubs in Hastings and St Leonards as part of Operation Mobli on Saturday night.
 

However the phones were handed in at the bar or security staff and not one was stolen.

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Making cuts doesn't work like that...

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Last February I - along with my Conservative colleague on Bradford Council - voted against the budget proposed by the Labour Party (and their little watermelon pals from Shipley). We lost and, amongst other things, the Council agreed to make savings in the provision of public lavatories.

This evening we discussed a report at (Conservative-controlled) Shipley Area Committee on the vexed matter of those public loo savings. We were asked to "approve" the cuts proposed by officers. Which would have been fine if a majority of the committee hadn't voted against having those cuts in the first place.

If Bradford's Labour Party wants to make cuts to services can't they do their own dirty work?

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At the same meeting, former labour councillor Tony Miller launched into a bizarre criticism of 'snow teams' - a scheme where the council gives some grit and shovels to local folk who want to clear their little bit of road. Tony suggested that it was wrong and people should be paid to clear snow. Only a socialist could find something wrong with the idea of volunteering!

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Austerity - everywhere but government

aus·ter·i·ty/ôˈsteritē/

Noun:

Sternness or severity of manner or attitude. Extreme plainness and simplicity of style or appearance.

Or as European voters would have it, a monstrous evil loaded upon them by bankers and their cronies in government. But what exactly are we speaking of here – what exactly do we mean by ‘austerity’?

I’m not here to present some sort of economic case as to the existence or otherwise of austerity, of a time when financial reality forces us to adopt – from necessity – that plainness and simplicity of style. The truth is that austerity for most of us is a fact but the austerity isn’t being driven by cuts in public spending – there are, in aggregate, precious few of those cuts. No, the circumstances forcing us to live an austere life are coming from the private sector and from the manner in which governments have responded to the unresponsiveness of the private economy.

Look around you, speak to a few of your neighbours, wander down the food aisles of the supermarket and, above all, spend an hour or two watching television advertisements. All will tell you of two things – the two things that are bringing that unwanted austerity upon us:

1. We have less money in our pockets – for some of us this is because we don’t have any work but for nearly everyone the amount has fallen because employers, struggling for business, aren’t raising wages, are reducing hours, cutting overtime and ending bonuses. Plus, of course, the government, fixed on its own cash flow problems has bunged up taxes
2. What money we have in our pockets doesn’t buy as much – that’s right folks, we’ve never had the deflation we were promised at the start of this crisis. The clever folk in the treasury told us that we needed to keep real interest rates negative because otherwise deflation would destroy value and wealth – we would be doomed. Some of us said this was rubbish and that the government wanted some inflation so as to reduce its (and the banks’) debt problems. And we were right – there’s now been at least four years of above trend inflation. That’s four years where savings have shrunk, four years of price rises. Plus, to cap it all, the government has put up taxes – VAT, excise duties, airport tax

Austerity isn’t a consequence of reduced government spending but of other government actions – taxes that are too high, interest rates that are too low, running the Royal Mint’s printing presses at full whack and failing to cut spending. Yes that’s right – failing to cut spending.

Let’s remind you that over three years Bradford Council will have cut over £100 million from its budget – that’s 25% of what we get in grant from government. And it’s true, jobs have gone, some unnecessary cuts have been imposed, a few facilities have closed but, in the main, the “cuts” have barely inconvenienced the majority of the City’s population.

And look a little further – those financial strictures haven’t been applied to the NHS where budgets have risen not fallen, we’re still spending millions each week maintaining an unwanted armed presence in Afghanistan and the merest of dents has been made in the welfare budget. In truth the government predicts that spending will rise by £50 billion between 2011 and 2015 – what sort of dire austerity is that?

Yet there is austerity – people are struggling out there, we may not have starvation but everywhere you’ll see faces telling you it’s tough. As I said, watch those adverts – not just the offers of loans or the debt scams but the everyday adverts. Look at the styling, consider the way we now see less of the flash, hedonistic and aspiration imagery and instead get and older, solid, calming language.

And that austerity is the fault of government – for they have created the inflation, they have increased the taxes, they have made the jobs more expensive. What they haven’t done is cut their own spending.

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An interesting little jobs statistic...

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Back in June 2008 - before the age of austerity, before the cuts, before all those civil servants were cast on the scrap heap, public sector employment in the UK was:

6,019,000 - that's 20.4% of the workforce

Now, after all the austerity, the draconian cuts and Osborne's reign of terror, public sector employment in the UK is:

5,942,000 - that's 20.4% of the workforce

Interesting don't you think?

Source: ONS (table EMP02 here)
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What I'd like to see in the budget...

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Over three years, Bradford Council will reduce it's cost to the taxpayer by around £100 million representing about a 25% reduction (although, dear reader, you should note that it is only around an 8% cut to the Council's £1.3 billion budget). There have been some negative effects on front-line services but these are mostly the result of political choice - our Labour leaders, faced with a slower rate of savings from reducing bureaucracy, made service cuts rather than use reserves.

Central government should set itself the same target over the same time period - a reduction of around £170 billion. I'm not going to set out precise details - that's what that Jeremy Hayward chap is for - merely that, if local councils can successfully reduce spending to this degree, I am absolutely sure central government can do the same.

And half those savings should go straight into tax cuts - raising the point at which income tax starts to minimum wage rates, abolishing the 50p rate of tax, reducing duty on beer, scrapping the tax on holidays and set in train a radical simplification of the entire tax system.

Won't happen...but wouldn't it be nice?

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The BBC - making the case for benefits reform (without meaning to)!

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The words are the regular BBC, soft soap, tear-jerking, sob story:

The family receive a total of £30,284.80 a year in benefits - well over the £26,000 cap proposed by the government. But, says Raymond, "If these proposals go through we will take a massive hit to our finances - and it's not as if we could move into a smaller or cheaper premises.

"I see eight people here having to choose between eating or heating."

Oh dear, this is terrible - how can the wicked coalition government inflict such suffering on this poor family!

Look again - the BBC provide a handy guide to the families expenditure - which includes:

Sky TV subscription - £15 per week
Mobile phones (plural) - £32 per week

...and a weekly shopping bill including 24 cans of lager, 200 cigarettes and a large pouch of tobacco. That's nearly £100 a week on booze and fags alone! And I'm guessing these aren't essentials to life?

After the cap is introduced this family will lose £82.40 per week. Seems to me that just cutting down on booze and fags plus moving to freeview telly would go most of the way to closing that gap - no need to turn the heating off or starve the kids, is there!

Bring on the welfare reform - if this is typical (and the BBC suggests that it is) there's plenty of room for savings without kids going without food or grandma dying of cold.

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Next time local government "leaders" plead poverty mention the £10 billion in reserves they hold....

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Overall, English local authorities expect to be holding £10.8 billion in reserves on 31 March 2012. At the same time last year, their forecasts for 31 March 2011 totalled £11 billion.

 I've mentioned this little fact before - in the context of Bradford* and Manchester with the former holding over £180 million in reserves and the latter an incredible amount of £260 million plus.

So when your local council whines about the cuts, lays people off now and makes no use of these reserves they are acting irresponsibly. We do need to "re-base" but the impact can be spread, the reductions and services changes properly planned and the decisions made carefully with due consideration of the needs and expectations of local residents.

*Bradford folk will, I'm sure, be delighted to know that over the past two years the Council's reserves have RISEN by nearly £50 million. 

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...they can't stop wasting your cash can they!

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This time it's Leeds City Council:

Leeds City Council is set to take over the economic research and intelligence unit of axed regional development body Yorkshire Forward. Under a plan to be discussed by the Council’s Executive Board on Wednesday 7th September, the five members of Yorkshire Forward’s Chief Economist’s unit will be transferred to work for the Council at an annual cost of £343,000.

Wow! In these austere times the Council has found all that cash to take on an economic research unit. Presumably Leeds City Council aren't closing any libraries, shutting down any care homes, reducing the hours at any swimming pools or cutting the funding for any community groups?

But then it's a Labour Council - they'll need some help with economics!

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"More in sorrow than anger, guv" - the machismo of cuts or the protection of services?

Many thousands of words have been expended on the “cuts”. On whether they are necessary, on the pain that results from their imposition, as to whether they impact disproportionately on poor people or ethnic minorities or women (and, for all I know, on the fairies living at the bottom of social workers’ gardens).

In all this discussion I worry that little effort is directed to the strategies followed by public bodies – and especially by local councils – in response to the settlement “imposed” by a chubby former Worth Valley councillor. Most of these strategies – at least in the north – seem predicated on delivering the maximum amount of reduction in 2011/12. And this is achieved, in part, through the closing of “front line” services – swimming pools, libraries, resource centres and lollipop ladies.

There is no doubt that councils have to make significant cuts – described by some as a process of “re-basing” rather than mere reduction. The question is how we decide to achieve that new base level of budget – by draconian cuts this year, by a process of reductions during the lifetime (three years) of the recent local government settlement or over a long period of time altogether. For most councils all three of these options are available.

The advantage of cutting this year is that it gets the pain out of the way and allows a drastic pruning of services such as leisure provision and libraries. And most councils have wanted to restructure these services for some while but, because of the political pain involved, have not done so. Bradford’s facilities review in leisure and sport was first commissioned in 2002 and went through assorted iterations without ever being implemented. No council leadership wants to be the one to close swimming pools and sports centres after all!

However, the downside of rapid cuts is that decisions to close or reduce services are inevitably ill-considered. And the requirements for user engagement, consultation with affected employees and the scrutiny-delayed council decision-making process mean that – as we’re discovering in Bradford – it’s actually pretty difficult to deliver the savings needed in just one year. It looks likely that – without further front-line cuts – Bradford’s budget will be overspent in 2011/12. I am sure the same situation applies to many other authorities seeking to deliver reductions amounting to 10% or more of the net revenue budget.

The result of this strategy will be that the scale of cuts in years two and three of the settlement period will need to be greater than anticipated – risking further years of pool closures, higher charges for care and redundancies. The aim of taking a quick hit followed by a smooth, managed reduction to the new base won’t be achieved.

Some councils – Leeds appears to be an example of this – have taken the approach of, in effect, borrowing from future revenues to reduce the need for cuts in 2011/12. The same reductions are made over the same period as we see in Bradford but the smoothed profile allows for greater consideration and planning in service reductions. Closure or service curtailment is less ill-considered.

Under this approach – as is the case for the “cuts now” approach – the council concerned protects its reserves position and its capital programme. So far as long-term developments are concerned it is more-or-less business as usual. Thus Manchester protects its ‘flagship’ Town Hall project and maintains a range of separate funds alongside the core revenue reserve – after three years the reserves position of the city will change little as a result of cuts. There will still be over £200 million in reserve funds – roughly half of which will be available for spending.

My contention is that a council could use a proportion of available reserves to allow for the “re-basing” to take longer – perhaps five years rather than three. This would mean that many of the decisions to close services in 2011/12 are not necessary – we have a far longer period to consult, to plan and to design structures for future service delivery. Rather than witnessing a frantic rush to find community-led solutions to libraries this could be planned and implemented across the library estate – achieving front-line cost savings without the disruption of threatening the closure of the services.

Similarly, the “restructure” programmes many councils are implementing would be less risky and there would be more opportunity to discuss the things that are essential, the things that are nice to have if we can afford them and the things that, frankly, are an extravagance. 

It may be right to close some facilities, to stop providing some services but this shouldn’t simply be to save some cash. It is right for councils, for example, to get out of the business of providing old folks’ homes – we don’t do it very well and it costs a great deal more for us to do it when compared to the best of the private and not-for-profit sectors. But it would still be right if the government had given us a massive increase in grant.

I find it pretty hard to justify closing centres for disabled adults just to effect some savings in this year’s revenue budget – especially when we’ve best part of £100 million sitting in the bank. This money – there for a rainy day – could allow a restructure of the council, the reconfiguration of services and the stripping out of duplication, waste and indulgence over a longer period. And at the end of that period Manningham might still have a swimming pool and Denholme a library.

But the options put before councillors were driven by predetermined departmental spending limits rather than a medium term financial strategy worth the name. Councillors will have spent hundreds of hours trawling through lists of “cuts” prepared by officers and will never have stepped back to look at the whole picture – to ask about income as well as about expenditure, to discuss priorities and to consider what needs to be provided by the council and the size of a ‘re-based’ budget.

Above all, no-one will have asked whether the cash reserves – tens of millions at most top tier councils and hundreds of millions in some cases – might be used to reduce the immediate impact of cuts, to allow replanned services and to ensure that the reduction of unnecessary bureaucracy takes priority over the closing of services to the public.

I might be wrong. I’m happy to be shown how such a strategy would be mad, bad or dangerous. But I’m not happy to see disabled people losing services because the council can’t move quickly enough to get rid of layers of surplus management, to start sharing back office functions with neighbouring authorities and to make better use of the flexibility and innovation in the private and voluntary sectors.

It seems to me that the machismo of making cuts – "more in sorrow than anger, guv" – has triumphed over a desire to concentrate on making sure the public we serve get the services they deserve for all those taxes they pay.

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About those Charity cuts...

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False Economy has the terrible truth about those cuts to charity income:

Research by trade union-backed campaign group False Economy shows that at least 2,000 charities and community groups have seen funding cuts since last summer.

According to the research, at least £110 million of cuts have been made to charities this year – although it anticipates that the final figures will be higher when local authorities confirm exactly how they will respond to the planned 30 per cent cut to their main grant from central Government.

The figures are based on Freedom of Information responses from 265 councils across England. All charities or voluntary groups receiving a funding cut of at least five per cent are listed in the research.

Dreadful I know.  But, dear reader, do you know how much charities in the UK bring in each year? You don't - let me help.

There are, according to the Charity Commission, some 162,415 charities with a combined income of £53.86 billion.  Yes, you did read that correctly - fifty four BILLION pounds of charity income.  And by my calculation £110 million represents about 0.2% of that charity income.

It's a cut.  It won't be evenly distributed. But....

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Bradford Council prefers front line cuts to back office savings...

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Yesterday we witnessed Cllr Greenwood, our esteemed leader, spluttering and struggling to justify the closing of swimming pools at full council. I guess dear old Ian never expected to get heckled by the public upset at what his leadership is doing - lovely to see a Labour politician revealing his distrust of the public by calling them a "mob" and "here just to make trouble".

And, in serendipitous co-ordination, the Council announced (although by way of a note on the website rather than a debate in the Council Chamber) that it is giving up on securing back office savings through collaborative working with other public sector organisations:

Earlier this year Bradford’s 'Place Based' Collaborative Working Programme closed, which means there is no longer any formal steering of collaborative working between participating partner organisations in the district.

So there you have it - Bradford's Labour leadership prefer cuts to front line services to creating back office savings through collaboration and joint-working.

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How to win elections No 1: Offer tax cuts

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The local elections were billed by some as a referendum on the “cuts”:

It is good to see that there are some principled anti-cuts prospective candidates standing in some wards, giving a voice to those fed up with the usual excuses, scapegoating and cuts policies presented by other parties. We have all had enough of the tweedle dee and tweedle dum approach of local and national elections. Hopefully, with wide support from local trade unionists, activists and residents, it can be shown that there is an alternative and we do not have to accept this rubbish that cuts are inevitable, the budget has to be reduced and we are all in this together. 

Seems to me that the UK Uncut agenda was completely rejected – even in that heartland of statist centralism, Scotland. Indeed, the Scots voted a tax cutting party into government:

The specific actions we would take to meet these targets are:

1) Lower corporation tax to 20% (currently 30%) to attract corporate HQ activity to Scotland and to make indigenous businesses more competitive

2) Lower business rates to below the English level (currently significantly higher than in England) 

Plus of course a freeze on council tax.

Yet again it’s shown that promising tax cuts gets votes.

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The NHS budget is growing - so why are they sacking nurses?

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Nothing, absolutely nothing makes the case for NHS reform better than this piece of shroud-waving from the nurses' union, the RCN:

Last November the RCN identified 27,000 likely NHS job losses during the next three years – but has now raised the estimate to 40,000.

Based on 9,650 posts at risk across 21 NHS trusts, 54 per cent of looming job losses involve clinical staff such as doctors, nurses and midwives.

The proposed job cuts analysed were a mere ‘snapshot’ of Britain as a whole, the RCN said.
Its chief executive, Dr Peter Carter, said: ‘Cutting thousands of frontline doctors and nurses could have a catastrophic impact on patient safety. Our figures expose the myth that frontline staff and services are protected.’

This reduction comes at a time when (along with international aid, for some bizarre reason) health spending is the only part of government spending not facing budget cuts. Here are the figures for resource 'departmental expentiture limits' from 2010/11 to 2014/15 (i.e. the budget excluding capital spending):

2010/11    £98.7bn

2011/12    £101.5bn

2012/13    £104.0bn

2013/14    £106.9bn

2014/15    £109.8bn

So the effect of an increase in funding for health care is the sacking of 40,000 employees (a suspiciously round number, by the way, so probably nonsense), half of whom according to the RCN will be from the clinical and medical staff. Part of the problem may lie in inflation but most of it can't - the NHS is incompetent, wasteful, inefficient and poorly led at every level. And the reason for this is that the consumers of healthcare - that's us the population of the UK - cannot exercise that consumer power. The various health unions - RCN, BMA, RCP and others - direct their attention to government. These organisations have been enormously successful:

NHS expenditure on doctors has doubled in the past five years. In 1999 the NHS spent £3 billion on their pay, increasing to £6 billion in 2004. The pay rise has not been matched by any significant increases in productivity.

And this has continued:

The figures show that, in 2000, the mean earnings of a consultant were £71,900. But by 2009 this figure had risen to £120,900 – an average yearly increase of 5.9 per cent. In contrast, across the whole of the pubic sector salaries rose over the same period by 4.5 per cent. For the private sector the rise was 3.7 per cent.

Staffing accounts for around half the total NHS budget and about 70 per cent of hospital costs. The Office for National Statistics recently estimated that productivity across the NHS as a whole fell by 3.3 per cent between 1995 and 2008, an annual average decline of 0.3 per cent. This was partly due the huge influx of new money in the early 2000s.

It seems to me - and the evidence supports this contention - that huge increases in "investment" have not brought the intended improvements in healthcare. Not that the NHS is always bad - thankfully around 64% of people surveyed are "satisfied" or "very satisfied" with the service rising to 80% with GP services. But this still means that nearly four in ten people aren't satisfied with the NHS and one in five are less than pleased with their GP.

Reform is needed - not moving procurement responsiblity about within the NHS family but shifting power to the consumer, to the patient. The last government set in train a fundamental shift in social care for adults - moving commissioning from bureaucrats to users through what is called 'personalisation'. While medical interventions are different there is a great opportunity to apply this principle to healthcare. At the same time the process of giving institutions - hospitals, clinics and so on - independence need speeding up. The lessons from the academies programme in education - real improvements from granting schools greater local autonomy - need to be learned and we need to stop viewing the NHS as a single monolithic service provider.

But most of all, we have to kick the BMA, RCN and RCS out from any positions of influence - these are simply trades unions and have no interest in the public. As with all trade unions their job is to secure the best deal for their members - nothing else. The government and health management should deal with them on that basis.

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When is a saving not a saving? A tale of some libraries

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Readers will know that the Labour leadership of Bradford Council decided – with support from our local Liberal Democrats – that two libraries in Bingley Rural, at Wilsden and Denholme, should be closed as part of the budget “savings”. Along with three other libraries elsewhere, this action was to contribute £70,000 out of the £56,000,000 total saving.

Now, leaving aside the spiteful nature of such a cut, it appears that the saving is rather a fiction. Here’s part of the letter given to “users” of the library:

All the staff who currently work in these libraries will be redeployed to other libraries in the district.

In conjunction with this the Council will consult with local communities about how best to deliver their library service in the light of the reductions to the library service budget. The Council will also carry out a community needs assessment.

So let’s get this right – closing the libraries will not result in any savings in staff costs, there are unlikely to be any economies in the book budget as a result and the Council will also have to introduce new stops in its mobile service to pick up the reduction in service to these villages.

Three out of the five closing libraries are run from Council-owned premises (not specialist libraries but community centres) so there is no saving in rent and the impact on central overheads must be small given these are libraries mostly open just ten hours each week.

In truth – or at least as far I am able to ascertain – closing the two libraries in Bingley Rural will actually save Bradford Council the cost of the rent for space in Wilsden Village Hall (less that £2,000) and a minimal amount in heating and lighting.  It seems to me that closing these libraries merely realises make-believe savings in “full cost recovery” and central overheads that could, in truth, have be achieved without closing a single library.

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