Cuts: Is Cameron a fool or a knave?

By Richard Watts / @richardwatts01

There was astonishment in local government circles when last week David Cameron urged local councils not to take the “easy option” and cut the voluntary sector.

The simple reply from many quarters was: “Local government doesn’t want to cut the voluntary sector thank you very much and the only reason we might have to is because of the unnecessarily massive and ideologically driven cuts programme you are forcing on us. But thanks for the advice.”

The simple explanation for David Cameron’s comments are that they are a cynical attempt to pass the blame for unpopular local cuts away from government and onto local councils. However, there could be something else going on. In the isolation that Prime Ministers, even new ones, inevitably suffer from David Cameron might actually believe that it will be possible for the voluntary sector to be spared if only public sector bodies became efficient and less wasteful.

This is the same Cameron who said before the election:

“What I can tell you is any cabinet minister, if I win the election, who comes to me and says: ‘Here are my plans’ and they involve frontline reductions, they’ll be sent straight back to their department to go away and think again. After 13 years of Labour, there is a lot of wasteful spending, a lot of money that doesn’t reach the frontline.”

Again, this could have been a cynical attempt to hide the pain of a massive cuts programme, but these comments could reflect a general view on the right, fed no doubt by the Taxpayers Alliance and their allies, that the public sector was so wasteful that billions upon billions of pounds could be cut without any real pain.

This belief runs pretty deep on the right. Some replies to my article last week on the pain of cuts said that Islington would be fine if only we got rid of some senior managers with ‘non-jobs’. Sounds a good idea, except for the fact that the conclusion was reached that some senior officers had ‘non-jobs’ based purely on their (admittedly fancy) job titles and not on any understanding of what the people actually do, which is vital to the council.

The thing about the Westminster Village, particularly for senior politicians, is that it’s very easy only to speak with people who agree with you, and reinforce your prejudices. So it could just be that David Cameron really does think that the voluntary sector could be protected if only local councils just got a bit tougher on waste and red tape.

Andrew Rawnsley wrote a week ago that ministers were now facing the reality that while there is, of course, some waste in large public sector organisations (and a small number of examples of gross waste in public projects, e.g. some defence procurement) finding cuts is much hard then they imagined – the public sector is pretty lean.

Some genuine efficiencies can, and will, be found but the public sector isn’t the basket case stuffed full of non-jobs, feathered beds and time servers that right-wing caricature would suggest.

Islington has had a Big Society, to coin a phrase, for many years. The borough has a thriving voluntary sector involving both professional ‘third sector’ organisations and groups of genuine volunteers. The reality is that so much work – commissioned by the council, NHS, police and other public bodies – now goes through the voluntary sector that cuts of anything more than a few percentage points will affect it.

David Cameron is wrong to say that cutting the voluntary sector is the “easy option”. We know that this sector has skills and capacity that will be lost forever if funding is cut. We also know that there is actually more political comeback from cuts to the voluntary sector than from cuts to directly provided services.

So if David Cameron really thinks that the voluntary sector can be spared from cuts if only local councils try hard enough he really should actually come to places like Islington and listen to what the potential impact of his cuts will be.

On the other hand, I could be being naïve and the PM’s faux-concern for the voluntary sector is simply an exercise in blame shifting.