How should Labour councils manage the cuts?

By Richard Watts / @richardwatts01

Local Government has borne the brunt of the Tory-Liberals early cuts to public services.

Advised by a troop of investment bankers (who, after all, never get it wrong) the Tory-Liberal government thought it could cut £6 billion of public spending immediately after the election with no damage to ‘front line’ services.

The merchant bankers told them, for example, that they could easily save a billion pounds from cancelling IT projects. Trouble is, the midas touch of the merchant banker hit again, when it turned out that the government could only cancel £90million of IT projects creating £910 million hole in their budget.

As always, councils seem to be the place where the Tories go to find money when plan A fails.

It’s politically easy to hit local government; after all there is another set of elected politicians who have to take the decisions and therefore the criticism.

So all councils have been hit hard and the most deprived, like Islington and Hackney, have been hit hardest. By choosing to cut the grants that go to the most deprived areas the Tory-Liberals are intentionally hitting the worst-off hardest.

Islington Council has had over £8 million taken away this financial year. More if you include cutting the pilot of universal free school meals which cost the council £1.6 million.

The speed and depth of these cuts are unprecedented and unnecessary. The cuts will seriously damage the economy and public services.

As councils we have to fill the hole, through a combination of reducing how much we spend in some areas and/or by raising our income to fill the whole.

There are some, largely in groups linked to the Socialist Workers Party, calling on councils to ‘resist’ the cuts by setting illegal budgets. But along this road madness lies. Aside from the illegality of setting an unbalanced budget, local authorities doing this would very quickly just run out of money; services would collapse and the losers would be the most vulnerable who depend most on council services. If councils run out of money to pay for meals on wheels, it won’t be middle class Trots that go hungry.

In the end, a Labour council must do the responsible thing and set a balanced budget, and as far as possible the budget must reflect our values.

In Islington, the government has cut money that goes to schools, pays for vital youth work and funds free swimming. The new Labour administration wasn’t elected to cut schools or youth projects and so we’ve protected these areas by finding other ways to pay for these coalition cuts.

The small rump of local Lib Dems that we are left with after the May elections have decided that the cut that they oppose the most is the one to hanging baskets of flowers on our busiest road, which shows where their priorities lie. Quite frankly after taking £8 million out of our budget it is a sick joke for any Lib Dem to ask for more spending on anything.

Other Tory-Liberal cuts are going to affect council budgets. The arbitrary cap on housing benefit, applied blanket-like across the country, is going to have serious affects on inner-London and could result in thousands of our people facing eviction from their homes in Islington alone.

Because of the affordable housing crisis in inner-London, councils run by all political parties have been trying hard to find families places to live in private accommodation. Over 90% of our family-sized private-rented housing is above the government’s housing benefit cap, meaning tenants could be evicted. The lunacy of this is that councils still have to house homeless families but will end up doing so in even more expensive and uncertain temporary accommodation. We do need to tackle dodgy landlords who are taking advantage of the current system, but in their quest for an easy headline the government and their right wing cheerleaders have hastily implemented a cut that will destroy communities and cost more as a result.

We are doing what we can to mitigate the cuts. We’ve bought forward a proposal to open a Citizens Advice Bureau (CAB) giving a face-to-face advice to new benefit and housing claimants right at the heart of the borough and keen followers of Labour List will have also read about The Islington Fairness Commission.

Still, it leaves a bitter taste in the mouth. Islington Labour didn’t win in May to make unprecedented cuts in public expenditure. This is a situation that’s been forced on us. My guess is the majority of Lib-Dems probably feel the same way. But Labour people should be clear: the responsibility for the cuts is that of the Tory-Liberals, and theirs alone.