Recent announcements by both Mid Suffolk District Council and Suffolk County Council to the effect that they are both going to need to make hefty cuts in their expenditure to deal with reduced income from Whitehall can only mean one of three things. Either they will need to cut waste, raise Council Tax levels in real terms, or cut services.
Raising Council Tax levels isn't that easy. The insistence that any increase above a certain, arbitrary, centrally-defined amount triggers a referendum of voters means that local councillors are loathe to even try - running a campaign against an increase in your tax bill is pretty easy, and most local politicians would rather tell you what they think you would like to hear, i.e. you can have services and someone else will pay for them.
And as for cutting services, well, most councillors would rather cut their own throats than tell you that's what is necessary. Even were they to be that honest, a political opponent will campaign against them promising to save whatever it is.
As an example, people like libraries. If perceived to be under threat, hundreds will demand that they be saved yet how many of them actually use them regularly? How many of those thousands of books are actually read by anyone? And in an era of Kindles and other e-readers, are library user figures likely to go up, or down? At what point do you accept that the cost of providing a service is too great for the benefits gleaned?
We have grown used, as a society, to the idea that someone else, usually government, will do things for us. Government will keep the streets tidy, so that we don't have to, it will maintain parts of our countryside for public use, build roads to make it easier for us to get places. Littering increases because, it doesn't matter, someone will come and clean the street, we take less care about our surroundings as someone else will, we grow used to having a direct route to places and worry less about the economic viability of having three routes out of a village.
And yet, we complain about the size of government, about its cost, about its remoteness from our communities.
Eventually, we will be forced to accept that, in order to maintain the services that really matter - health, education, social welfare, to name but three - peripheral services might have to go. The prize then goes to politicians who are willing to be honest with their electorate and engage them in the debate about what is core and what isn't. Here at the Creeting St Peter Journal, we're not holding our breath...
Eventually, we will be forced to accept that, in order to maintain the services that really matter - health, education, social welfare, to name but three - peripheral services might have to go. The prize then goes to politicians who are willing to be honest with their electorate and engage them in the debate about what is core and what isn't. Here at the Creeting St Peter Journal, we're not holding our breath...
2 comments:
We have not "grown used to the idea that Government will do something for you". I, along with millions of others, have paid the Government, as part of a deal, for things we expect from our large amounts of money, mostly taken from us by force or without our direct sanction. Burgeoning allowances for the "cutters" at the councils wasn't part of that deal.
Anonymous,
Really? Don't you ever wonder how we got to a state where the Government spends more than it raises? Or why Government does so much more for us than it did for our grandparents, or great-grandparents?
And, actually, you do sanction it, or at least, society does, of which you are a part, by electing politicians of one colour or another. Or, if you don't vote, you did rather concede the decision to someone else. Did you vote at the last set of District Council elections, for example? If you did, you're in a minority.
But of course, if government was spending money on things that you approve of only, it probably wouldn't be long before you complained about what it wasn't doing. And that's the point that I'm making. Even the Daily Mail spends just as much time complaining about waste as it does demanding that Government should do something about whatever has upset it this week. That means employing people to do whatever it is they want done.
There is an argument to be had about salary levels in government, but you can't be bothered to articulate it in anything other than a gross generalisation. What is the Chief Executive of a District Council worth, and how does that compare to an equivalent job in the private sector? If the rules of supply and demand apply in the public sector, do they in the private sector? The man who runs your bank gets paid some eye-watering amount. What do you do about it, because you're paying for it? Or the chief executive of your preferred supermarket, or any number of private companies you patronise with your custom? Not your problem? Well, it is, because you're paying their salary. Or is it acceptable because you don't directly employ them?
And where did I say that salaries in local government were too high (or too low for that matter)? They may be either, and it may have an impact on the services you get. A good, well-paid Chief Executive may inspire staff to work harder, do better, be more efficient. That's probably a good thing, and makes them worth what they're paid.
You may not get what you pay for, or you may be surprised at what you actually get for what you pay, but instead of posting here anonymously, stand up, tell the world who you are, and campaign to do something about it, and then we'll find out whether your view of the world has some support.
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