Murphy, P

English

Nottingham Trent Institutional Repository (IRep)

How cuts to local councils will affect you  December 7, 2015 12.28pm GMT  Peter Murphy  Author 1. Peter Murphy  Principal Lecturer in Public Service Management, Programme Director, Nottingham Trent University  Disclosure statement Peter Murphy receives funding from research councils. He is advisor to Centre for Public Scrutiny.  Partners  Nottingham Trent University provides funding as a member of The Conversation UK. Republish this article We believe in the free flow of information. We use a Creative Commons Attribution NoDerivatives licence, so you can republish our articles for free, online or in print.  Republish  Cuts to councils continue where they left off from the last parliament. OccupyMCR/flickr, CC BY-NC-ND   Email   Twitter1   Facebook0   LinkedIn0   Print If shrinking and reshaping the state is one of George Osborne’s big ideas then local authorities are right in the firing line. The chancellor’s recent spending review and autumn statement has local councils bearing the brunt of billions of further budget cuts. As a former local authority chief executive, the announcements left me with the uncomfortable, but depressingly familiar impression of “smoke and mirrors”. While the cuts to local authorities were largely buried in the excitement of an apparent u-turn on tax credits, essential public services face serious cutbacks over the next four years with some of the biggest now backloaded into the fourth year, often as unidentified efficiency savings. Local authorities are the traditional safety net for regional issues that can find no other advocate. When local communities or individuals have a problem – such as insurance issues after flood damage or the loss of a local post office or pub – and can find no designated agency willing to help, they invariably default to their local councillor and council. But with resources already reduced by more than a third over the course of the last parliament, local authorities are rapidly losing their ability to react to changing circumstance or to meet the public’s needs. This is what that looks like in practice. Education Until recently, spending on schools and education was the biggest part of a local council’s responsibilities and budget. Previously councils were responsible for nurseries, schools and colleges, education infrastructure and support services such as special educational needs. Committed to abolishing the role of local authorities in the schools system, however, the latest spending review will see the rise of more academies, as sixth-form colleges can now become academies. This flies in the face of numerous criticisms of academies' admissions policies, wasting resources by creating excess school places, variable standards and privatisation to entrepreneurs with no experience of or expertise in education. Cuts are a threat to unprofitable local services like libraries. Megan Trace/flickr, CC BY-NC  Social services and welfare The biggest expenditure by local councils is now on a combination of social services, public health and welfare benefits. Despite the u-turn on tax credits, welfare spending overall will be cut by £12 billion by 2020, with specific cuts from a cap on housing benefit confirmed in the autumn statement. Adult social care is one of the areas that will be most affected by these cuts. Councils have been given the option of increasing the portion of council tax dedicated to social care by 2% to meet this need. But this revenue will not be enough to rescue adult social care and in particular care homes who are faced with ever increasing demand and unit costs driven by minimum wage increases. With Health and Social Care integration looking more and more essential by 2020, it is likely that social services and public health will have been subsumed by what remains of the already strained NHS. Planning and transport Planning is already becoming a token fig leaf at the local level, and investment in transport is becoming centralised. The Department of Transport was one of four departments that agreed cuts in their budgets over four years before the Autumn Statement, with spending set to fall by 37%. While capital spending is set to rise, local planning, delivery and maintenance of transport services and transport infrastructure is likely to suffer. Potholes, congestion and longer journey times are almost assured. Recreation and culture Councils also take care of sport, recreation and cultural facilities. At a personal level, local authorities register our births, marriages and deaths, they organise our elections and they provide funeral services. These are the sort of unprotected services which are under the greatest threat. Local parks could be at risk. ncbeeny, CC BY  Local authorities will be reduced to being “commissioners” of services to be provided by others who will only do so for profit. Any service that cannot be run at a profit, will not exist. Nobody runs swimming pools, public parks, or museums at a profit – they require a public subsidy if they are to survive. Cloak and dagger Osborne and his acolytes have devolved responsibility while keeping a tight hold of the purse strings. By using the rhetoric of devolution and localism, Osborne is distancing himself from future direct responsibility for the damage to come. Relying on the private sector to pick up the slack will result in the most vulnerable sections of society, who don’t have the money to help themselves, suffering. This approach to local government is a surrender to the market and the post code lottery. It will result in the entrenchment and extension of inequality between people and places. Osborne’s obsession with the small state has a strong resonance with the administrations of Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge. Two of the worst presidents in American history, they too believed in cutting back the state. Indolent and ignorant, but politically hugely popular in their time, their policies in the 1920s laid the foundations for the great crash and the depression of the thirties. While Osborne may have inherited the great recession, his policies will elongate its impact.  

How cuts to local councils will affect you

 Flood response hit by regional austerity cuts Pete Murphy The Conversation websiteon Forecasters predict a wetter than normal start to March that will no doubt hamper efforts to bring an end to the misery of those whose homes are underwater. These extended floods and bad weather reveal the changes in how emergencies are handled.  Extreme weather conditions such as rainfall, wind, heat, cold, and tidal surges are becoming more common, and their impact felt for longer. Risk management planning by emergency services needs to start accommodating medium and long-term changes to the pattern of threats, particularly from the environment. This is something that Public Management and Governance Research Group and the Emergency Services Research Unit are already working on with the emergency services and government.  One of the key questions to arise from the current floods is why the government has seemed so out of touch with what is happening on the ground and why the preparations and responses to the emergency have been so uncoordinated. After all, we live in a world of round-the-clock media coverage and instant access to news on mobile phones and portable computers. Yet the government’s response to floods that began in December came weeks, even months late.  Part of the answer lies in the closure in 2011 of the Government Offices, a regional network that functioned as the local points of presence of central government departments. This has led to cuts in the capacity and funding of the regional resilience and emergency planning teams that had operated in the nine English regions.  The Civil Contingencies Act replaced the earlier and very much outdated Civil Defence and Emergency Powers legislation, most of which dated back to World War II.  This came about as domestic and terrorist threats to services, along with widespread flooding in England and Wales between 1998 and 2000 and the outbreak of foot and mouth disease in 2001, became more numerous and their social and economic impacts more widespread.  This Act established Regional Resilience Teams in each regional office, small groups of dedicated specialists that co-ordinated and developed local resilience networks which brought together emergency planners and emergency responders. These include police, fire, ambulance and coastguard services, but also experts from for example the Environment Agency, Network Rail, Highways Agency, NHS, and electricity, gas and water utilities.  These specialists prepared and updated emergency plans and established a two-way dialogue between the centre office and local emergency responders through Local Resilience Forums. At times of emergencies they could call on their local knowledge, assistance and contacts in the area, or of the teams within the offices.  These teams knew their local areas well. They were in regular contact with all the key people on the ground in local communities – people who would know where and what resources were available, who would need to be involved, and how to effectively co-ordinate their deployment.  However, the regional Government Offices were caught up in the bonfire of the quangos and swept away in a tide of austerity rhetoric and an anti-regional agenda spearheaded by Eric Pickles at the Department of Communities and Local Government.  Now, what’s left of the Regional Resilience Teams have become the responsibility of the Cabinet Office, somewhat defeating the point of their local links, and numbers have been slashed. Staff now operate in a semi-peripatetic way across one of the three regions England is now divided into, essentially the North, Midlands and South. Inevitably these staff have a much thinner network of contacts, and no real chance of knowing the huge geographical areas under their control in the detail needed.  The local forums have been left in place but inevitably with less support and guidance. They are all experienced in dealing with emergencies, but at a time when the affects of emergencies such as these floods are becoming more widespread and prolonged, there is a greater rather than a lesser need for better co-operation between emergency services – services which have themselves been subject to significant funding cuts.  Stripping away this layer of regional government has resulted in a demonstrable loss of organisational capacity, as well as historical knowledge and experience, all at a time of rising demand. The government is well aware of the need for co-ordinated response – it established the Joint Emergency Services Interoperability Programme between the three main emergency services which produced it’s first publication just weeks before the floods began. But for those on the ground, it’s a case of fine words butter no parsnips. 

Flood response hit by regional austerity cuts

http://irep.ntu.ac.uk/id/eprint/26685/1/PubSub3981_Murphy.pdf

Flood response hit by regional austerity cuts

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