Council spending ‘57pc less on services than in 2010’
Rossendale now spending 57% less on services than it did at the start of decade
IT’S the league table no council wants to be at the top of, yet here we are with Rossendale sat in second place.
Which league table? The spending cuts one - and it makes grim reading for anyone involved with Rossendale Council.
According to research by the TUC, based on data from the Local Government Association, Rossendale has been the second-worst hit council in the country for funding cuts since austerity began to bite in 2010.
The data is grim: In 2010/2011, budgets which were set prior to the coalition government coming to power, Rossendale spent £16.9m. This year, that will have dropped to £7.3m, a drop of £9.6m.
It’s a change of -57%, or £146 per person in the borough. Other councils have seen a greater fall in total spending, but just one council, Reigate in the south east, has seen a greater percentage fall in spending.
When council cuts are talked about in this column, one of two things happens: Either Labour supporters write in pointing out all the damage that Tory-led spending cuts have had, or Tory supporters write in saying that there was no alternative given the state of the economy, which they blame on the last Labour government, when they took power.
While that’s fine as a political argument, it doesn’t take us any closer to solving the underlying challenge: Rossendale now spends 59% less on services than it did at the start of the decade.
Yet we, as tax payers, are paying more for our services. Tax rises have been steady in the past couple of years, after a period where the Tories paid councils the equivalent of a 2% increase to ensure there were no council tax rises.
This is where praise is due to the council for the fact we haven’t felt the cuts more. The bins are still emptied, and it’s hard to point to a service which has had to be axed by the borough council. Some services have moved away from the council, such as Ski Rossendale or the Whitaker, and we now pay for some extra things, like brown bin collections, but overall, is the service we received that much different from 2010?
Where there have been problems, they have been when the council has tried to venture into doing things on top of its core services.
The Empty Homes Scandal remains a blight on the council, and we don’t know how much of the council’s spending decline between 2010 and this year is due to money being used to support the estimated £5m cost of completing the collapsed project.
There’s the closure of Haslingden Baths, which over time has been presented by some Labour activists as an ‘austerity cut’ when in reality it was a strategic decision by the council to divert money meant for the new pool toward the purchase of the Valley Centre instead.
Years on, and the baths, once a proud community facility, lies abandoned and a magnet for vandals.
The new bus station has finally opened, but we still don’t know at what future cost to the council, nor what will happen in the next phase of the Spinning Point development which was meant to be shops, then a hotel, then flats, and now seems to be a spa. For now.
But for the day to day services the council provides, maybe we should doff a cap at the fact the council is still even functioning, let alone providing comparable services, after Rossendale received one of the worst bodyblows to spending anywhere in the country.
And ask those standing for election: How will you get Rossendale’s funding back to where it once was?