Council reserves aren’t a secret stash

By Sarah Hayward / @sarah_hayward

Tory tabloid cheerleader, The Sun, has been fed a great little recess story today about council reserves. Accompanied by a map, of councils* hoarding cash, while cutting front line services. Camden** gets a mention.

If you buy the Sun line, Camden’s sat on a right little gold mine while taking darstardly action to cut front line services. If you follow local government you’ll know that this is a long standing attack on Labour local authorities from the government and second only to their suggestion that we can share a few more paperclips with, in our case Westminster, and not cut any front line services at all.

Both claims are a big fat lie. And because the one thing Pickles and Shapps are not, is stupid, they must know this.

Reserves for public bodies are our savings accounts so we can pay for the big ticket items when they come up. Only a very small proportion of Camden’s reserve is unallocated – about enough to keep us up and running for a few weeks should something absolutely catastrophic happen to our cash.

You can see for yourself what Camden’s reserves are earmarked for, we publish it in full every year. So my question back to the Sun and DCLG ministers is what of these programmes should we cut? How about we don’t build our Homes for Older People? What about cutting the money allocated to invest in our school buildings – after all you cut £250m BSF funding – maybe we should follow suit? Or perhaps we’ll chop the money we’re holding back for future mental health care – in the borough that has a higher proportion of its population with mental health issues than any other?

Go on tell us – which of these programmes shall we cut? Of course I’d be much happier if we didn’t have to spend the £12 or so million we’ve had to allocate for redundancy payments.

The other thing they don’t tell you about reserves is that, like a savings account, they can only be spent once. They aren’t self replenishing so even if we cancelled all this work, spent the money on the cuts, unless the Government is going to increase our grants, or give us greater income generation powers, at a later date, cuts will still have to be made in the future.

When the Tories tell councils to use reserves, it’s like me telling you, to use your savings to cover your mortgage. Eventually the savings run out but the mortgage still needs paying.

Their attack is encouraging reckless financial management, as well as being disingenuous.

*Councils – well, only Labour ones

** Camden – well only if you live here. If you’re in the cloud cuckcoo land of CCHQ, we’re actually called “Camden, Ed Milibands local council” – just so you know.

Sarah is a councillor in Camden and also blogs here.