The cuts that will hurt the most

Council services, including elderly care, children’s centres, parks and libraries, among other vital services, have suffered desperately under the weight of the previous government’s spending cuts, which amounted to an £18bn cull in real terms since 2010.

 
But local authorities’ pain is far from over, after last week’s autumn statement revealed that they will continue to bear austerity’s greatest burden.

 
The central government grant – the primary source of local authority funding, worth £18bn – will be phased out entirely by 2020, leaving local authorities facing a gaping £4.1bn-a-year black hole.

 
Local Government Association chairman Lord Gary Potter, also a Conservative peer, explained just how catastrophic the impending local authority cuts will be.

 
“Even if councils stop filling in potholes, maintaining parks, closed all children’s centres, libraries, museums, leisure centres and turned off every street light, they will not have saved enough money to plug the financial black hole they face by 2020,” he said.

 
Chancellor George Osborne contends that the shortfall will be made up by new measures that will devolve power to local government, representing what he calls a “revolution in the way we govern this country”.

 
These measures include allowing local authorities to control and keep 100 per cent of receipts from business rates and property sales, as well as allowing councils to raise their council tax by 2 per cent to fund social care.

 
Red herring

But Unite national officer for local authorities Fiona Farmer argues that this is a red herring, and will go nowhere near replacing the funding lost from government cuts, especially for the most deprived communities.

 
“If you look at the argument about business rates, the impact will be very detrimental for the poorest areas,” she said. “Those that benefit from business rates will be areas that are already quite affluent anyway. Those that will suffer will be the inner city councils – the Manchesters, Liverpools and so on.”

 
The same, Farmer notes, goes for allowing councils to raise council tax to pay for social care.

 
Liverpool city council has said that its annual social care bill stands at ÂŁ172m a year, while a 2 per cent rise to council tax in the city would generate only ÂŁ3.2m.

 
“This measure will be nowhere near enough to make up the difference, especially for councils where property prices are low,” Farmer said.

 
Farmer described the immense strain local authority staff are already under after five years of austerity.

 
“The local government workforce is already the lowest paid across all the public sector,” she said. “About 25 per cent are paid below the Living Wage, and nearly one in eight rely on in-work benefits just to survive.”

 
A quarter of a million local authority jobs were shed over the last five years of austerity. But these job cuts are only the beginning, Farmer notes.

 
“We’re looking at thousands of job losses across the UK – up to 6,000 in Birmingham, 3,000 in Glasgow, 2,000 in Edinburgh and so on,” she said. “We would say that local government is coming close to total collapse.”

 
For those local government workers who are left after jobs are slashed, Farmer notes they face worsened terms and conditions – allowances, annual leave, overtime and mileage are all cut to the bone as austerity continues to bite.

 
As council staff suffer, so too, do those who use council services, many of whom are from the UK’s most deprived communities.

 
Unite community coordinator for the southwest Brett Sparkes is on the frontlines of local authority cuts, and knows intimately the effect cuts have had on vulnerable communities.

 
Under threat

Most recently, Sparkes and Unite members, along with the local community in Swindon, mounted a protest against the shuttering of children’s centres. Already, seven centres, which serve a large number of vulnerable children, were shut in April, with the council’s remaining five now under threat.

 
“The services these centres offer are not available anywhere else,” Sparkes explained. “They’re absolutely vital in assisting young families. Especially in rural areas in the southwest, young families will have nowhere else to go to for support.”

 
Sparkes points to a Bristol respite centre as another example of the effect government cuts are having on local communities.

 
Unite Community spearheaded a day of action against cuts to beds at the respite centre, which provides short breaks for severely disabled children and vital support for their families.

 
“The replacement services the council offered are completely inadequate,” Sparkes noted.

 
“These examples are all part of a larger pattern we see in austerity Britain,” he added. “Over the last five years, we’ve seen a rise in homelessness as housing costs skyrocket, people suffering mental health problems not getting the help they need, people going hungry and living on the streets.

 
“And it is council services that are there to support these people falling through the cracks,” Sparkes explained. “But now, if the latest cuts go through, all this support will be gone.”

 
Farmer agrees, adding that the cuts will not only cause immediate suffering among users and local authority staff, but will also actually add to public expenditure in the long-term.

 
“If social care and services collapse, the onus then moves on to the NHS,” she notes. “It’s far more expensive for the elderly, the vulnerable and the infirm to be looked after by the NHS than it is by local government.

 
“We’ve seen already that leisure centres, libraries and youth services are being completely axed because they’re not seen as essential,” Farmer added.

 
“But again this is a false economy, because if you don’t invest in youth services, then you’ll end up paying more somewhere else, whether it’s in the justice system or the NHS – some other budget will pick up the costs and the repercussions.”

 
Both Farmer and Sparkes highlight another outcome of severe local authority cuts – the transformation of councils from providers of services to commissioners of services.

 
“When councils become nothing more than facilitators of private contracts, services suffer because companies are beholden to shareholders, not to the communities they serve,” Sparkes explained.

 
Although dark days are ahead for local authorities, Sparkes believes there’s still much that can be done to combat cuts to services on a local level.

 
“Conservative councils are in league with the Tory government, adopting their mantra of cutting services to the bone, especially services that help the most vulnerable,” he explained.

 
“Despite central government cuts, councils still make decisions – in Bristol, the council there wanted to cut disabled kids’ beds but was perfectly willing to spend more than £2m on 20 mph road signs in the city.

 
“In this sense, we as a community can stand together and still challenge the cuts by challenging these local decisions.”