Providing a ‘dented shield’ against Tory cuts

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LondonBy Jules Pipe

Local government faces the toughest financial challenge in living memory and the numbers are stark. In London the recent Local Government Settlement will take over £500 million from local councils this year alone, an 11% cut, with the burden falling most heavily on some of the most deprived areas in Europe. In my borough of Hackney alone, we have faced a £44 million grant reduction this year, with further reductions to come next year.

The scale and pace of these cuts will inevitably mean that many local services across the country will at the very least change beyond recognition, where they continue to exist at all.

The contemptuous attitude of local government ministers has been shocking. With councils facing some of the toughest budgets decision many of them will ever have had to take, they are accused of hyperbole and shroud waving.

Ministers offer the panaceas of reducing senior salaries and sharing services, yet the much trumpeted tri-borough arrangement in Conservative west London boroughs will save only £35 million over three years across all three boroughs – a drop in the ocean when many of us will face budget gaps well in excess of that in just one year.

Local government is not the last bastion of public sector waste that ministers and sections of the media would have the public believe.

Nor have London boroughs shirked the challenge of operating at a cheaper cost to the public purse. Between April 2004 and April 2009 London boroughs saved £1.2 billion – in my own borough that has meant recycling more than £60 million savings into providing more frontline services.

Local government is modern and forward thinking, but confident in the knowledge that local democracy is crucial, and that local services are more often than not best provided by an elected leadership fully accountable to the people they serve.

It would be naïve to assume that were the Labour Party in government, that local government would not be facing some spending reductions. They would, however, not have been as fast or as deep, nor would they have targeted deprived communities in the way that these frontloaded grant reductions have done.

The impact leads one to conclude that this is little short of an ideologically driven war on local government. The Big Society, in as much as it is anything, is a world in which state-provided public services are seen as at best wasteful and at worst actively malign. It is a world in which I have witnessed government advisers in policy seminars passionately espouse the social good of the National Health Service being reduced to a vehicle for ‘health hotels’ where patient’s families are expected to assist in the care of their loved one and “clean wounds, to put in drip lines, and to manage their own treatment”.

There you have this government’s vision for public services in this country: the NHS as field hospital in the Crimean War.

What is a Labour councillor and Labour council’s role in this crisis? Firstly, we must be the Labour Party’s voice on the ground, leading the campaign against the Tory-led government in our local areas, making sure the blame sits squarely with those in Westminster who are responsible and focusing relentlessly on winning back the London mayoralty as the stepping stone to the return of a Labour government at the next general election.

When it comes to our actions in the Town Hall we must remember that this is not Poplar in the 1920s and nor is it Liverpool or Lambeth in the 1980s when defiance and deficit budgets were seen by some as our only weapons against the government. The world, and the law, has changed since then – in the twenty-first century nobody gets surcharged, nobody goes to prison, nobody gets to be a hero. Quite apart from the irresponsibility of placing councils in a unsustainable financial position that would threaten the most vulnerable service users, legislation would mean that any council who chose this path would be taken under special measures and the cuts implemented regardless.

What Labour councils can do is provide that ‘dented shield’ that council leaders such as David Blunkett deployed in Sheffield in the 1980s.

In these tough times, we must make our councils engines of local government, shaping the area according to the aspirations of voters, not local administration simply enacting the destructive will of national government. We must protect as best we can those services that we as Labour local leaders believe to be most important.

And we must prepare our councils to face the worst of the ongoing storm – not simply through managerial and technical solutions but through applying our Labour values to ensure that local councils remain a democratic expression of the collective will of local people, entrusted with the provision of services and the protection of the vulnerable.

* Jules Pipe is Mayor of Hackney and the Leader of the London Councils Labour Group

* He will be speaking at the Progressive London conference ‘There is an alternative – protecting London, opposing Tory cuts’ on Saturday 19 February, Congress House. More details and to register online here.

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