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Councillors can’t ignore the fact they have less money to spend – it won’t work

September 27, 2012 3:16 pm

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Owen Jones’ call to councillors to ‘resist the cuts’ earlier this week (Come on you local councillors. Resist these cuts!) will sound attractive to many.  He’s right that people didn’t become Labour councillors to cut services.  They became Labour councilors to make a difference in their communities, to help the most vulnerable and to protect public services. But his call for councillors to simply to ignore the fact they have less money to spend won’t work.  And you don’t need to take my word for it – it’s been tried before, so let’s learn from our own history.

In the 1980s Ted Knight led Lambeth Council to catastrophe when he refused to implement government cuts.  He tried to spend millions of pounds more than he had available.  The debts he ran up were so vast we’re still paying them off today – at a cost of over £20 million pounds a year.  That’s all money we would be spending to protect public services if Ted Knight hadn’t bankrupted the council all those years ago.

In the end services were cut much harder than they needed to be thanks to Knight’s debts.  But it wasn’t Knight and his colleagues who suffered, it was the people who relied on those services – frail older people, children in care, the disabled.  Knight’s irresponsibility led not only to mountains of debt, but to fraud, service failure and incompetence on a breath-taking scale.  Knight turned himself into a cuts martyr by martyring the people he claimed to be defending.  Labour must never make that mistake again.

Labour councillors oppose the Government’s unfair cuts because they fall hardest on the poorest.  We have protested against the cuts. Last year we ran a campaign to highlight the damage that Tory cuts are having on the people we serve in Lambeth. And I believe we must continue to highlight examples of the misery the Tories are causing.  That’s why I’m leading a London-wide campaign for more school places for the capital’s children. Our research has shown that by 2016, without adequate Government investment, one in ten primary-age children in London will not have a permanent school place. We’ll be highlighting the damaging decisions which Michael Gove and George Osborne have made which threaten the life chances of thousands of thousands of young Londoners. And we’ll be campaigning for the investment in education that London desperately needs.

But we must also find practical ways to limit the pain by protecting the most vulnerable and finding different ways to maintain support for the people who need it most.

Anything else is an abdication of our responsibility to the people who elected us to defend them in the face of a feckless government that would love, more than anything else, for us to repeat the mistakes of the 1980s so they could use Labour’s failures locally to beat Labour nationally.

We’ve taken the responsible course in Lambeth, working to protect public services and create new jobs. I’m co-chair of the country’s biggest regeneration zone in Vauxhall. The project will create 32,000 new jobs and 2500 new affordable homes, the single biggest generator of new jobs and homes in the country.

And despite the government’s appalling decision to cut a third of Lambeth’s total available budget since 2010, we’ve protected all 10 libraries in the borough from closure and on 4th July 2012 we opened a brand new state-of-the-art library in Clapham alongside a new leisure centre and swimming pool. We’ve also frozen council tax for 4 years with no increase at all since 2008.

In the end, what Jones is recommending would simply prolong the life of this wretched coalition government and the misery they are causing. Labour councils up and down the country must demonstrate to people how Labour can govern responsibly and fairly. If Labour can’t be trusted in local government, people won’t trust it to run the country.

Steve Reed is the leader of Lambeth Council

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  • http://www.facebook.com/anthony.hunt.3950 Anthony Hunt

    To be fair to Owen, I read his article as describing a view rather than subscribing to it, but yours is a case well made anyway.

    I’m the resources cabinet member for Torfaen Council in South Wales, and while the situation here is improved somewhat by the Labour Government in Wales and its attempts to help protect local services, we’re still in a very tricky financial situation.

    Let’s make it clear, we oppose the cuts and this situation isn’t what we dreamt of when we got into politics, but it’s vital that instead of complaining and wallowing in our ideological vanity, we roll up our sleeves and do all we can to protect the poorest and most vulnerable in our communities. That will involve working with unions and other partners equally aware of the realities of what we face and what we need to do to resopond practically. We may not always succeed, and the blame for the suffering should lay squarely at the door of the UK Government, but to refuse to try would be a neglect of duty.

     

  • Brumanuensis

    Steve Reed is absolutely right. Trying to ‘resist’ the government by not setting a budget is essentially the same as having Eric Pickles writing your budget. Not exactly an improvement.

    However, I’m at a loss to explain why you’ve dragged Owen Jones into this, given that Jones states in his penultimate paragraph: 

    “Those councillors in Southampton are right – this situation is intolerable. But fighting back is not straightforward. Some anti-cuts activists argue that Labour and Green councillors should simply refuse to implement cuts, and set budgets based on people’s actual needs. But councillors respond that they would not be martyred, as in the past, through imprisonment or being made personally liable for funds. Instead, the Department for Communities and Local Government – led by Eric Pickles – would simply intervene and impose cuts with different priorities. Labour-run Islington Council, for example, might then lose policies it is rightly proud of, such as free school meals and the London Living Wage”.

    So the difference between you and Jones is considerably less than you are implying. Jones is arguing that councillors should not wedge themselves into piece-meal battles with the DfCLG, but instead co-ordinate their response to the government, whatever that may be. I’m sure you’d agree that’s a perfectly sensible approach and not at all on the same level as Ted Knight’s theatrics.

    • http://twitter.com/redrenie24 Renie Anjeh

      Well Jones basically stokes up a fight with the right of the party because of his dislike for Peter Mandelson but if you scratch the surface he has a lot more with the right of the party than he himself would admit.

    • http://www.stuartbruce.biz/ Stuart Bruce

      Perhaps the reason that Steve ‘dragged Owen Jones’ into it is this sentence in the paragraph after the one you quote “Whether it be planning co-ordinated days of action in their boroughs – or even more radical actions – they are specially placed to mount a challenge to national cuts.” 

      “Even more radical actions” sounds disruptive and negative to me. Gesture and damaging politics, rather than the more effective campaigning and policy advocated by Steve.

  • http://www.facebook.com/people/Mike-Homfray/510980099 Mike Homfray

    You can’t not set a budget – this is the whole point. Owen Jones realises this – he isn’t a headbanger.

    But I do think that we should be leading a campaign against local government cuts, in particular the very unfair funding mechanisms which have benefited areas we will never, ever control (Wokingham, Waverley et al) but hit Labour and marginal areas hard.

    It would be a good way of smoking out some of those LibDems as well. And it would facilitate a much higher and united profile, so we would all speak with one voice.

    At the moment councils are doing their best to preserve what they can but there is no clear campaigning message across boundaries and I think there should be

  • http://www.facebook.com/Dan.Filson Daniel Filson

    Many Labour councils have compromised themselves by accepting the Government bribe to hold their Council tax levels at zero increase for successive years. The result is that revenue balances are being run down and any council tax increases or spending cuts be the harder when eventually they have to be made. The public have not had explained to them how revenue support grant is manipulated by central government, and how a small twitch to grant requires a larger increase in council tax or a severe cut in revenue spending. Nor has it helped that councils have deferred the execution of cuts until the last eighteen or so months of this Parliament which may also make the next general election tricky.

  • Brumanuensis

    But Reed has still constructed a staw-man. Jones wasn’t advocating what Reed claims he was and as the quote itself indicates, didn’t express a preference for any particular course of action, only a belief that councils would have more leverage with the government if they acted as a united front. 

    I’m sure we can play semantics about what words ‘sound’ like, till the cows come home, but unless Reed can prove that Jones said what he claims he said, his criticism is just a pointless piece of hand-bagging.

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