Save money? Close down the council

A council proposes a £600,000 summer break. Pickles talks rubbish. Villagers raise council tax to protect their library. • How to save a local authority £600,000: close down the council for a week . That’s the proposal (see paragraph 14) on the table at Hounslow council in west London (and due to be discussed with unions on Friday) as it grapples with £18m of spending cuts. The idea is on the face of it simple: the council already closes for a week at Christmas, so why not do it again in August? There are clear benefits, reckons the council: reduced summer holiday childcare costs for workers who have school age offspring, for example. And think of the bills: officers estimate it will save at least £5,000 on gas and electricity alone over the week. But where does the other £595,000 come from? That’s where it gets trickier. The period would count as unpaid leave for staff – equivalent to a pay cut of 1.92% – which as you’d expect has not gone down well (although there will be no formal “break in service” so it won’t affect pensionable pay, says the council). The few staff who will have to work over the closure period don’t escape the pay cut – they will have to take the unpaid leave at another time. There are other potential pitfalls: once they’ve exhausted the inevitable “will anyone notice” jokes, residents may not take kindly to the temporary closure of services they tend to take for granted. Not for nothing are officers worried about: “Negative publicity for the Council.” • Communities secretary and supposed uber-localist Eric Pickles is again getting worked up about – what else? – rubbish. This time it is Somerset’s new policy of charging £1.20 a time for householders to deliver their own waste to council tips. The charges were introduced by Tory-controlled Somerset county council to keep open four dumps otherwise due to close in the face of cuts of £300,000. Warning that it will create “perverse incentives that will lead to more fly tipping, Pickles promised the Daily Telegraph : “We will not allow municipal bureaucrats to introduce such backdoor bin charges for the collection or disposal of normal household waste.” But how will you not allow it, Eric, how? Will you bring down the iron fist of the central state on Somerset? As Steve Read, the managing director of Somerset Waste Partnership told the BBC : “It is not illegal, it is in the spirit of localism.” • More evidence of localism in action in the leafy parish of Aldbourne , near Marlborough in Wiltshire, where residents have voted to add an extra £7 to average council tax bills in order to protect services at the local library which were threatened by the cuts. Wiltshire council had proposed to replace local librarian Trish Rushen with a big society-style volunteer arrangement. But in a referendum residents voted 283-102 on a 26% turnout to stump up for the £5,400 savings themselves. Affluent Aldbourne’s decision perhaps should not be read as a barometer of the wider public’s preparedness (or ability) to support much-loved public services through what are effectively co-payments (or as a touchstone of its interest in big society experiments for that matter). But it is an interesting challenge to conventional political wisdom that no-one will ever, anywhere, vote to increase council tax. • It seems most local authorities have heeded ministerial exhortations to dip into their reserves to make ends meet in the Age of Austerity. Local Government Chronicle (LGC) correspondent James Illman reports today that 72% of councils are spending reserves [paywall]: over 30 expect to deploy upwards of over 30% of their stash, while Blackpool, Corby, Barnsley, Enfield, West Somerset, Essex Police Authority all forecast they will use up more than 50% of their rainy day fund in 2011-12. The LGC report doesn’t say, incidentally, what the reserves are being used for, or how much of it is being spent by councils on redundancy payments to staff made jobless by the cuts. I’ve blogged before on councils’ use of reserves (and why it is that wealthy Tory-controlled districts have the biggest war chests). I’ve also blogged on the incompetent attempts by Treasury chief secretary Danny Alexander to make reserves a party-political issue (this survey would appear to make that tactic even more of a nonsense). But what’s most interesting is the comments by Steve Freer, chief executive of the Chartered Institute of Public Finance and Accountacy, who warns in the article that draining reserves now may not be entirely prudent given the pressures facing councils over the next few months: “There is almost a new need for reserves in the current climate. Authorities have put together budgets which have much higher levels of risk than usual. We are looking at budgets that have as many as 50 change projects in them. If one project gets blown off course that may not bring the authority down but if quite a few go off course that could have significant consequences.” • Back in February I blogged about Sefton council’s cuts consultation , which with commendable frankness prioritized all its services into four categories according to their perceived importance: critical, regulatory, frontline, and “others”. No service was immune from cuts, it pointed out, but it was clear that those that found themselves in the ominous-sounding “others” category were the most vulnerable. Since then Sefton has finessed the latter category even further, dividing it into three tiers. Services which find themself in the first tier, which includes libraries and leisure centres, are effectively given a stay of execution so long as they promise to find substantial savings. Tier two services (tourism, child and adolescent mental health) are given the lesser-of-two-evils treatment: safe, but your budget is cut by 50%. It’s worth keeping an eye on these two categories to see if they slip down a tier when the council comes back for more cuts next year. Finally, there are the condemned, poor and marginalised tier three services, for which nothing could be done. All have been unceremoniously axed, to save £3m. I’d love to know more detail about what has been lost through the cutting of these services, and what the consequences will be. Here they are: Pupil Attendance Under 8′s Service Contribution to Early Years Families and Schools Together (FAST) Surestart (Every Child A Talker) Continuing Education Post 16 Surestart (Dcatch programme) Music Service Other Courses Special Educational Needs Standards Grants Teenage Adolescent Mental Health Grant (TAMHS) Youth Opportunity Fund Keystage 4 Foundation Learning Public sector cuts Local government Public finance Patrick Butler guardian.co.uk

Posted by on April 7, 2011. Filed under News, Politics, World News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.