Austerity and Local Government

I thought I should follow up on my post of yesterday about the austerity agenda.  The key confusion that the calls for Councils to "resist austerity" are based on the bizarre idea that local government can pursue a macro-economic agenda of expansion contrary to the policy of central government.  It can't.  Local government is so financially dependent on central government in this country, and legally bound to balance the budget each year so an independent economic policy is impossible.  Quite simply, macro-economic expansion is something only central government can do

This means that a Council such as Brent has to act within those severe limits.  The depth of the severity of the cuts of local government I referred to some days ago are usefully outlined here.  They are literally the worst seen since at least the 1930s.

The mitigation of the government's agenda  comes through:

• Making genuine efficiency savings by doing things differently.  An example of this might be recycling more, which cuts the cost of disposal whilst essentially doing the same thing as before (collecting household waste).
• Cutting real waste that does not deliver benefits to the public.  For instance, a lot of modern IT can deliver savings through avoiding bureaucracy.
• Removing certain activities that are not really the business of Councils to provide, such as the grants to the potpourri of community festivals that Brent used to provide.
• Increasing Council income through the better use of assets such as improved treasury management, commercial lettings, tax collection etc.

All this takes you so far.  It also demands a pretty hard nosed assessment of objectives and how to achieve them.  There is a constant danger of falling into the lazy mistake of assuming that spending equals achievement, which is the kind of thing I meant when I mentioned measuring outputs in street cleaning. 

I fear that Brent Council is getting less and less of this kind of thinking just at the time it needs it more and more.

That this is not yet apparent is related to Adam Smith's remark that "there is a great deal of ruin in a nation".  The cuts have long term effects that only become apparent after they have been in place a long time.  For instance, cuts to the highways budget mean slowly accumulating potholes.  By the time it has become a really serious problem the backlog of repairs needs a vast amount to fill.