Northants Council: a “national scandal”

To see modern Conservatism at its worst, just pay a visit to Northamptonshire, said The Guardian: there you’ll find the basic business of local government – “emptying our bins, helping the elderly wash” – in crisis. Years of austerity, an obsession with keeping council tax low and a radical plan for outsourcing services – plus “grotesque mismanagement” – have left the county council effectively bankrupt, just when the cost of social care is soaring. Its newly announced plans for balancing the books are desperate, said Patrick Butler in the same paper: cuts of £70m from a budget of £441m in the next few months, and a further £54m in 2019-20. Even priority areas such as child protection will be affected: what will remain is a busier, “people-not-dying” level of service. It all raises some daunting questions. Who decides who is “vulnerable enough” to receive help? And what happens when a council can’t afford to meet its statutory obligations?

Local authority budgets have, of course, been squeezed by austerity, said the Daily Mail. But “how easy it is to blame cuts when the true culprit is gross incompetence”. This is a council that commissioned a new £53m headquarters and then had to sell it within months of completion; that paid 23 consultants more than £100,000 a year each; that offered an adult-learning course on “How to Wear Scarves Effectively”. It’s a “national scandal” – and those are the words of a local Tory MP. True enough, said Deborah Orr in the I newspaper, but Northamptonshire isn’t alone: with £16bn cut from local councils’ budgets since 2010, experts suggest that another 15 are in serious danger of going bust. All across England, they’re looking for ways to make quick money or keep their budgets down – and the only people likely to benefit are property developers and private care providers, who are standing by to make a quick buck.

There’s a “swift and easy” answer – the Government should lift the cap on local taxes, free local spending and allow local people to pay for the services they want, said Simon Jenkins in The Guardian. That’s how things worked, perfectly well, up until the early 1980s – and most countries see it as a “normal feature of democracy”. In France, only 60% of taxation is controlled by the centre, compared to 95% in Britain. It’s all about power: Westminster would ultimately like to dictate everything, whereas what we really need is for councils to be given the financial freedom to do the job expected of them. Unless that happens, they will have to carry on slashing parks and libraries. Britain will find itself heading “to pre-victorian days”.