Local Government finance: it seems that I may have been right all along...

It would be fair to say that I am a fiscally cautious soul. I've loathe to borrow in order to fund expenditure, I believe in balancing the books as far as possible, although I do endorse the notion of investing to save. And as a Parish councillor, I am not bound by legislative restrictions on precept increases, unlike principal authorities.

As a result, most town and parish councils are in modestly good financial shape. The same cannot be said for our principal authority counterparts, many of whom are showing increasing signs of financial stress.

Here in Suffolk, our County Council is looking to make £64.7 million worth of savings over the next two years, and has borne the brunt of increases in costs of children's services and social care. And that has meant something of a slash and burn across the non-statutory services - funding for the arts and culture will be reducing to nil in 2024/25, for example. It hasn't been popular, to say the least.

I am sympathetic... to an extent. The Council is where it is, and to continue spending as it had would be catastrophic in pretty short order. Hard choices have to be made.

However, the Suffolk Conservatives brought this upon themselves with their rather fanatical devotion to freezing council tax under the leadership of the likes of Colin Noble - they didn't increase council tax at all between 2010/11 and 2015/16. By doing so, rather than essaying modest increases in council tax charges year on year, they effectively denied themselves income in each successive years by increasing amounts and, with the Government's cap on council tax increases squeezing increasingly tightly thereafter, it was inevitable that the financial settlement would get more and more uncomfortable.

There were those of us who warned of that at the time but we weren't heeded - the desire for electoral success trumps financial reality most of the time.

And Suffolk is far from the worst affected authority. Counties didn't get involved in commercial property for the most part, and the series of calamitous failures that have dotted the past two years or so tend to feature Boroughs, Districts and big city Metropolitans, but they're now sending up distress signals ever more frequently.

There's no obvious signal that the Government is going to appear over the horizon like the Seventh Cavalry, and an incoming Labour administration may have plenty of other calls upon the resources it can muster. Which means, I fear, that life in our communities will become that much more basic, and councillors will be reduced, effectively, to delivering services specified by Central Government. So much for local democracy.

There is a small (very small) consolation, in that some of the slack may be taken up by Town and Parish Councils. And we've seen recently some of the fruits of that, with nineteen Local Councils successfully bidding for grants under the Community Ownership Fund - the first time that they've been able to do so. That had to be actively sought through the lobbying efforts of the National Association of Local Councils, something that Ros played a leading role in as part of her role as its Honorary President.

But, regardless of what happens this year, an incoming administration needs to think seriously about giving local authorities the freedom to make their own choices, to raise funds according to their needs and to encourage them to innovate, rather than apply centralised shackles. And whilst I'm not convinced that the control-freakery tendency within the Labour Party will want to relinquish that power, I would suggest that, if they want much local democracy to survive, it is a road they need to travel.