PluggedIN: The financial pressures facing local government
Author: Alex Thomson, in the MJ |
A couple of months ago, I suggested, in this column, that one consequence of the financial pressures facing local government was that a number of councils would soon find themselves receiving no grant at all, funded from council tax receipts and their locally-retained share of business rates only – poor but free, in other words.
A very slender silver lining to a rather dark and stormy cloud perhaps, but it’s something to hold on to – for some, at least. Another interesting ramification of the financial tumult convulsing the sector is the emphasis it will place on political priorities.
I’m sure that some local authority chief executives have occasionally found themselves, in moments of exasperation, thinking to themselves, ‘Wouldn’t it be easier to deal with all these problems without the politicians getting in the way’.
But, despite the occasionally-volatile balancing act between officers and members, at a time when extremely difficult decisions are having to be made, the role of political leaders has never been more important.
First, it cannot be stated often enough that local government functions as well as it does because it is so visibly and closely accountable to the people it serves, and it is the councillors whose names are on the ballot papers.
They call the shots and they live or die – politically – by their residents’ views of whether these shots hit the bullseye or ricochet dangerously around the local area.
There is a plethora of options open to local leaders trying to keep their council afloat – trimming services across the board; sharing services with a range of public sector partners; spinning out services into trading ventures, letting them work their own way to viability; partnering with voluntary, private and public sector organisations – see here, community budgets, et al – to jointly redesign local services; and many more.
The key point is that local political leaders are the ones elected to navigate the most appropriate course through troubled and ever-changing waters.
Second, with an ever-shrinking proportion of council budgets available for non-statutory services, the somewhat-counterintuitive result is that political priorities matter more.
No longer can every local authority lay on the full range of non-statutory services – each has to choose what really matters to its electorate and forego the rest. To stretch the analogy, it’s not just steering the ship past the rocks, it’s about deciding which cargoes get thrown overboard during the storm.