New ideas needed to stave off crisis

WE knew it was coming and here it is: a financial black hole in council spending of £1billion. It means there will be cuts on top of cuts. Some local services will be reduced or scrapped. Jobs will be scaled back or axed. Schools. Social services. Refuse collection. Almost every aspect of council spending will be affected and all at a time when, thanks to an ageing population and low wages, demand for services is actually increasing.

There can be no question over who is primarily to blame for the crisis –and in fact that there is worse to come from the UK Government, which is only about half way through its austerity drive. But the budgetary crisis in local government requires a radical response from politicians and officials at all levels – at Holyrood and in every council headquarters across the country.

Some local authorities have already acted. Many councils have done what they can to make savings without cutting into frontline services. Thousands of jobs have gone through voluntary redundancies. But there is a limit to how far that process can go and profound change to local government and funding is needed as austerity cuts ever deeper.

The need for such change has been widely recognised and discussed for some time. Six years ago, The Herald’s Reshaping Scotland campaign raised awareness of the impending public sector crisis and potential remedies such as the sharing of services, and in the years since, a few councils have recognised the need for change and responded with some merger of backroom services. But many have proved resistant to reform.

That position is no longer tenable and today The Herald continues its campaign for change at a time when the need for it could not be clearer. As Professor Richard Kerley, of Edinburgh’s Queen Margaret University, among others have indicated, most councils have failed to make long-term plans and they need to be made now if the effect of the cuts on Scotland’s citizens can be mitigated.

There are several questions that should be up for discussion. Are councils doing enough to work across their boundaries? Is 32 the right number of councils? Can local government still do everything that it is expected to do and is universal service provision still sustainable? Should councils be given greater powers? At an even deeper level, there is another question: what is local government actually for?

On the first question of closer working, some councils have shown willing (notably Stirling and Clackmannanshire), but five years on from Sir John Arbuthnott’s attempt to encourage councils in the west of Scotland to work more closely together, signs of progress are slow.

On the second question – whether 32 is the right number for councils in Scotland – there has been even less progress. And as Iain Docherty, Professor of Public Policy and Governance at Glasgow University, points out, the 32-council structure was introduced by John Major’s government for ideological reasons. It is not necessarily the most logical structure for Scotland.

None of this means the Scottish Government can sit back and do nothing, for it has a role to play too in looking again at the council tax freeze. The policy may have been introduced with the intention to save taxpayers some money at the height of austerity and it had the support of all the major parties, but in piling on the financial pressure on councils, it is now having unintended consequences for those the policy was intended to help.

The challenge for councils is how to respond to this crisis so they can continue their vital role in providing the services we all depend on. There will naturally be a limit to what can be done to protect services when the UK Government is so determined to push on with austerity, but a new structure has the potential to increase council accountability and revive local democracy. In the weeks ahead, everyone concerned – the Scottish Government, taxpayers, pressure groups, trade unions and the councils themselves – must decide on a structure that is fit for purpose.