On Wednesday the eight-person cabinet of Somerset county council voted through £28m of spending cuts, spread over the next two years. Over the previous six months, speculation had raged about whether Somerset would become the next Conservative-run council to join Northamptonshire in effectively going bankrupt and to call in government commissioners to sort out its mess.
And here was the answer, delivered at not much more than a week’s notice. To avoid a final disastrous plunge into the red, there would be a hacking down of help for vulnerable families and children with special educational needs, youth services, road gritting, flood prevention and much more.
The proceedings took place at Shire Hall, a mock-Gothic Victorian edifice in Taunton, Somerset’s county town. An hour before they started, around 80 people had gathered to protest, chanting a slogan apparently dreamed up by the local branch of the public sector union Unison: “Don’t let the eight decide our fate.”
Among the quieter participants in the protest were women who work on the county’s GetSet programme, which helps some of the county’s most vulnerable children and families. Around 70 of them are set to lose their jobs.
For fear of getting in trouble, they insisted on speaking anonymously. “There’ll be no early help,” one of them told me. “Families won’t get any attention now until they’re in crisis.”
“I’m lost for words,” said one of her colleagues. “I don’t know what to say, really. We’ve kind of been expecting this for years, but at the same time you think surely it won’t happen.” They said they were expecting the finer details of the cuts’ implications to emerge in the coming days.
This is proving to be the year when the drastic austerity imposed on councils reaches a critical point. In February Northamptonshire hit a financial wall and issued a section 114 notice, banning expenditure on all services outside its statutory obligations to safeguard vulnerable people. As well as Somerset, councils in Norfolk, Lancashire and East Sussex were soon said to be in danger of going the same way.
What is austerity?
Austerity is how governments across Europe – from the UK to Greece – tried to clear the overdrafts, or deficits, they racked up in the wake of the great financial crisis.
How did governments try to achieve this?
Their strategy was two-fold. First, cut spending on the public sector, on wages, for instance, or on social security. Second, raise revenue through higher taxes and selling state assets. Greece, for instance, has sold its airports in Corfu and Santorini, among others, to a German company.
What was their reasoning?
Proponents made a variety of arguments for this strategy. It was said that governments had spent too much money, that everyone needed to tighten their belts. The UK’s then-chancellor, George Osborne, claimed that the public sector was "crowding out" the private sector, taking resources and workers away from businesses. Particularly influential was a paper by two US-based economists, Ken Rogoff and Carmen Reinhart, arguing that once a country’s total public borrowing rose above 90% of its national income, or GDP, growth would slow sharply.
Did austerity get unanimous backing?
Critics argued that austerity would stop economies recovering from the shock of the banking meltdown and would make teachers and nurses and people with disabilities pay for the excesses of bankers and chief executives. In his book Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea, political economist Mark Blyth showed that austerity had been tried before in the 20th century – everywhere from Weimar Germany to 1930s America – and failed, often with politically disastrous consequences.
Each of these councils has its own story, but there are two common threads: they are Tory-run, and their financial problems are often ramped up by the needs of populations spread over large areas. Somerset, which covers 1,640 square miles, is a case in point, and like many English counties its outward appearance belies its social realities.
Articles in Sunday magazines might suggest the county is now the preserve of farmers and recently arrived hipsters. But its three largest towns are Taunton, Yeovil and Bridgwater – post-industrial, hardscrabble places that contain 19 council wards in the 20% of English areas classed as the most deprived, and whose social fabric has already been drastically damaged by austerity.
Inside the council chamber, the debate occasionally flared into anger, intensified by the fact that members of the public had been given only 48 hours to read 600 pages of documents before submitting questions.
Labour and Liberal Democrat councillors repeatedly brought up the fact that between 2009 and 2016, Somerset’s ruling Conservatives had imposed a freeze on council tax, when an increase of 1.9% would have brought in an additional £114m. There were mentions of Somerset’s recent record on children’s services and the fact that in 2013 inspectors from Ofsted gave its work the lowest rating of “inadequate”, a verdict it says it has been trying to address since.
There was also talk about what was going on at the highest levels of the administration. In April the council’s finance director departed after 31 years and reportedly took a job at a donkey sanctuary; his temporary replacement is said to be costing the council nearly £1,000 a day.
Legally, all councils have to set an annual balanced budget. In this financial year, the meeting was told, the council was facing an overspend of £11.4m. Much of this was rooted in the rising costs of children’s services, traceable in turn to a shortage of social workers, foster carers and adopters. But there were plenty of other factors at work. In the last five years, the biggest block of money Somerset receives from central government, the so-called revenue support grant, has fallen from around £90m to less than £9m. Next year it will disappear completely. The county’s reserves are now down to a mere £7.8m.
Ten years ago, as George Osborne commenced the era of austerity, the council’s Tory leadership gave the impression that it was only too keen to help. These days, by contrast, most of the Conservatives trying to find a way through the mess have the wearied, put-upon look of people hanging on to an ethos of public service but involved in something so difficult that it seems almost impossible.
This theme ran through the 20 minutes I spent talking to the council’s Tory leader, David Fothergill. He said the council’s problems had affected his health, but he wouldn’t be drawn on any specifics. “This isn’t why I came into politics,” he said. “We all try to make things better, but at times it seems like we’re making things worse to try to get there.”
Up until 2009, the council was run by the Lib Dems, which also had three of Somerset’s five MPs. Now, all of the county’s parliamentary representatives are Tories, along with 35 of its 55 councillors. As much as anything, then, this is essentially a story about the Conservative party, and the widening gap between national politicians and the local councillors whom they expect to dutifully implement many of the decisions made in Westminster and Whitehall. By way of making these tensions clear, one Somerset MP this week accused the council of being “an object lesson in waste”.
“Three or four weeks ago,” Fothergill said, “I wrote to all of the Somerset MPs, telling them what was coming. Very little has come back. Four or five days ago I wrote saying ‘I really need some help – we’re getting to the sticky end of this.’ And I got nothing back: no response.
“I know we’re all busy, but actually the most important people in all this are people who live in Somerset. And I will stand up for them and make myself very unpopular, because my job is to look after them.”
Not long after we spoke, an emailed statement from the Department for Housing, Communities and Local Government arrived: “Our funding settlement gave a real-terms increase in resources for local government in 2018-19. Local authorities are responsible for their own funding decisions, but over the next two years we are providing councils with £90.7bn to help them meet the needs of their residents. We are giving them the power to retain the growth in business rates income and are working with local government to develop a funding system for the future based on the needs of different areas.”
As Fothergill led six hours of discussion in the council chamber, his voice occasionally cracked with emotion. Early on, he announced that a £240,000 cut in help for young carers, which had prompted no end of outrage, would be deferred and reviewed. But everything else passed, and there was frequent talk of more cuts to come.
In the Shire Hall’s cavernous reception area, Leigh Redman, one of Somerset’s three Labour councillors, said: “The leader of the council needs to stand up and start pointing the finger. He should stand up and say to the government: ‘We’re bankrupt. You’ve put us in this position – now get us out of it.’”
Was he talking about setting an illegal budget, and thereby triggering the arrival of government commissioners?
“If needs be,” he said. Then he paused. “I’m waxing lyrical,” he said. He turned and went back up the stairs to the council chamber. There were three hours and several millions pounds of cuts still to go.
