UK local councils predicted to become skeleton services

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Local authorities will offer little more than a skeleton service, providing few services beyond social care and rubbish collection by the end of the decade if projected cuts to local government continue, council leaders have warned.

The Tory chair of the Local Government Association, Sir Merrick Cockell, warned the trajectory of government spending meant that current funding arrangements "will not see us through for very much longer" and would lead to the running down or wholesale closures of services such as libraries, road maintenance, school support schemes and youth clubs.

Financial modelling by the LGA calculates that by 2020 funding cuts, coupled with rising demand for services, will create a funding shortfall of £14.4bn, with the widest gaps in funding falling on the most deprived areas of England, where demand for services is likely to be highest.

"It is evident that a system in which demand and costs are going up and funding is going down is unsustainable and unless something changes, by the end of the decade, councils will not be able to deliver existing services in the way they are delivered now," said Cockell.

Last week's comprehensive spending review revealed that councils' funding will be cut by £2.1bn in 2015-16, a scale of annual reduction the LGA says is likely to continue for six more years.

The LGA estimates that while total council income in England will have fallen by £7.4bn between 2010-11 and 2019-20 (a real terms reduction of 27%), demand for expenditure, driven largely by an ageing population, will rise by £7bn (14%).

This figure would be even higher, but it factors in £1.6bn which councils will raise by increasing charges for local services, as well as £8bn from efficiency savings. The LGA described its financial assumptions as "rather on the optimistic side" and did not include additional financial pressures caused by welfare reform.

The communities secretary, Eric Pickles, attacked what he called the "doom mongers" and said mainstream political consensus around the need for public spending restraint meant councils would have to "make extra effort" to find savings well into the future.

Speaking at the LGA conference on Wednesday, he announced that community budget pilots, which seek to find savings by forcing different public services to work together more effectively in local areas, would be rolled out nationally, with the potential to save billions of pounds.

The LGA said spending on adult social care, children's social services and refuse collection, which are considered "core" local services and are relatively protected, will absorb an ever greater share of council funds, with the effect of reducing funding for other council services by 46%.

But it points out that councils have a legal duty to spend on many of those other services. If they also protected free bus passes to pensioners, street sweeping, and repaying loans on infrastructure investment, all duties which councils would find difficult to decommission, then the level of cuts falling on other services rises to 60%.

Local authorities will face a wave of legal challenges as they try to balance meeting their statutory duties and delivering a balanced budget, the LGA predicts.

Councils in poor areas, which are more dependent on central government grant will be worst hit. Although the LGA does not single out councils by name, its data shows that the 50 most deprived councils in England will grapple with potential funding gaps of up to 48%. For the least-deprived councils, most Conservative-controlled, the gap will be up to 21%.

A separate report published by the Royal Society of Arts said councils urgently need to manage soaring demand for services. Although social care demand was set to increase greatly over the next decade, funding for elderly social care would fall by 18% by 2015-16 and by 23% for children's social services.

If the government doesn't do any good for their citizens, there will be no order. Cuts to local police forces means order is more difficult to maintain. This is about local councils, in any case. How are the roads expected to be maintained if the council won't? What are the many poor elderly people in the UK whose relatives can't afford to take them in supposed to do to survive when their local residential home gets shut down? These cuts will be made without council tax cuts, too, meaning more taxpayers' money will go on less services.

How does one go from having one of the most literate societies in the world and being a Superpower in their own right (at least as late as the 1950s), to being completely broke?

The best thing a government can do for its citizens is keeping the society quiet peaceful orderly and making it an attractive place for investors to build productive firms which will give the people employment.

ruveyn

"Of course, this is not a good time to be talking about the pay element of the package, save to notice that in the public sector pay increases are limited to 1 per cent a year. But, given that there has never been a good time, this is as good a time as ever," he added.

They are just about to get a rise of around £10K a year.
The parlimentary watchdog has said that if they don't get a rise they will start fiddling their expenses again.

As for austerity measures:

Sir Ian Kennedy, IPSA.