Cuts, Kind And Unkind

In Jane Austen’s “Persuasion”, Sir Walter Eliot, a man of estate and mortgages but reduced income has to be told that “Retrenchment” is necessary. Being a vain and difficult man used to his comforts and especially status he finds it almost impossible to accept before being gently leveraged into it by his close advisers.

They wish to avoid the embarrassment and difficulties that would arise were he to go under. Inevitably, the minor hardships of the family are as little compared to the laid off servants and estate workers. He had to be reminded of what could happen.

If you want to see what could happen soon in UK local government look across the Atlantic at the developing bloodbath in local services in the USA at State, County and Township level. Small town America is going into stasis and in many cases collapse.

Whilst some local services may have become too generous, over blown and over ambitious they were as nothing compared to what the Brown Spendfest did in our own local government.

There are those who are shrieking about “cuts” when there are figures that show that apparently all Cameron, Clegg, Osborne and Cable are up to is to slow the rate of growth of spending appreciably. The suggestion is the “cuts” will relate only to planned growth and not existing services and there is much fine talk of ring fencing etc. In your dreams, baby, in your dreams.

Been there, done that, in that in the late 70’s and into the 80’s I was there. The mad Heath (was anything sane he touched?) reorganisation of the early 1970’s was accompanied by the adoption of over ambitious standards and schemes to prove the worth of all the upset and turmoil.

All the local politicking of the early 1970’s that was involved meant bidding promises going up and up. At the turn of the decade it all had to be put through the various mincers in the next few years.

With regret, I have to say that the situation is far worse today than it was then. This is not only in terms of the gross numbers of increase and extent of activity, it is within the structure of the budgets. To begin with, the relevant pension schemes then, if anything were running a small surplus. There was no need to worry about bailing them out with taxpayer money.

Also, there was not the curse of PFI schemes with their absolute priority on revenues and the way they ratchet up over time. The cost of buying them out is extreme. There were not the hordes of consultants, financial advisers and other sundry hangers on not only taking a handsome cut but with watertight contracts.

In a similar way there were not the numbers of top and senior executives on salary multiples way, way above levels of thirty years ago. Also, there were not senior staff and management contracts with expensive get out clauses and huge inbuilt pension commitments.

We did have a few quango’s that were a nuisance and some regional bodies albeit on a very small scale and doing some useful liaison work. We did not have the huge complex of agencies and other bodies now which need major staff work within the local authority to keep in touch with and to be consulted before any significant decision or funding was needed.

There was far less legislation governing what we did, how we did it, why we did it and how we were accountable for doing what someone or group elsewhere thought might be a good idea or keep some noisy people with access to the media happy. There was nothing like box ticking or hideously complicated legal requirements all with unintended consequences that mire us in confusion and costs.

Employment legislation of one kind or another still imposed restrictions as did the agreed conditions of service for most employees. But these were light years away from those of today and whilst bound by UK law we were not then subject to all the vagaries and notions embodied in European and related laws. Then we could still understand what we were doing or at least make an informed guess. Now, does anybody really know or grasp all that is entailed?

At least we knew where to start and how to do something. It was unpleasant and distasteful for the most part. Also, there were still fixed elements in our budgets that were difficult to reduce or to amend. So a good many of the reductions and adjustments, or retrenchments became the cuts of the time in a number of services.

What should terrify you is that the percentage we had to cut, by my estimate, was less than half of what needs to be cut now. If it can’t come out of the fixed parts of the budget it will have to come out of the services.

Perhaps the message next time you ring the Council will simply say, don’t ring us, we’ll ring you.

Going Potty Over Potholes

Those who drive, some who walk, but especially those who ride bikes, manual or motor will have noticed that across the land potholes have been sprinkled over our roads like fairy dust upon a moonbeam. A representative of the Local Government Association, motto “Your money or your life” has been roundly blaming the utilities for their indiscriminate digging and delving activities that, I quote, “have wrecked the structure of the roads.”

Before you mob rush off with your pitchforks and cattle prods to put up stakes and pile on the brushwood, I have to tell you it is not as simple as that.

Why do the utilities dig up roads? Because in the last 150 years we have required a lot of services we regard as essential to be installed below the surface. It began with drains and water, then we had gas, then electricity, then telephones later complex telecommunications and lately cable TV and other things.

Now there is not only a lot more down there, but the pace of development and change entails more activity. In other countries some of these facilities are carried above ground at much less cost.

Add to this the older services were often installed at a time when less robust systems were the rule and are now past their effective life. During the mid to late 20th Century the maintenance budgets of the local authorities and other bodies were often insufficient to keep them all up to standard and were the first parts of the spending to suffer any cuts being made.

There are other factors. The insistence of the government on extensive high intensity building adds to the pressures on existing services and systems. Also, we forget the earth moves. Water tables can go up and down, subsidence is common in many areas, and tree growth can impact on sub surface structures. There are other things as well to add to the movement.

The trouble is that our local authorities have forgotten what they were created for in the first place. Governments have piled on so many new jobs, initiatives and notions about what they might do that councillors have been giving themselves all sorts of airs and graces uttered in modern management speak, garbage in garbage out.

One of the basic duties was to enable people to move around on roads easily. Recently, it seems that many authorities are trying to make it as difficult as they can and as for keeping a reliable surface on the roads ours has certainly abandoned direct responsibility for that.

There are two other important matters. One is the practice of minimising reserve capability to deal with less common or rare events, such as a bad winter, or a wet summer. The other is the actual vehicles using the roads.

We do a fair amount of driving on the local minor roads and back roads often in the rural parts of our county. These are where the activities of the utilities is far less and there can be long stretches untouched by these organisations. But the numbers of potholes are not fewer, they are often more, and the increasing rate of breakup of the road surface as well as the degradation of the sides and verges is remarkable.

Why should this be? Because so many trucks and other vehicles are bigger, heavier, go much faster and give the road surface a real pounding. Also, there are a great many more of such larger vehicles using the roads for various reasons. So they are taking a great deal more heavy punishment. Not only are many of the lesser trunk roads deteriorating fast, but many of the minor roads and country lanes are in a very bad state.

The reason why the structure of these roads is being damaged is because that structure was never strong enough to take this sort of use.

The ugly truth is that if we wish to consume more and have more and need many more bigger and heavier vehicles to carry all this as well as ourselves on all the journeys we make then not only do we have to fill in the potholes, we are going to have to rebuild the basic structure of almost all our road system.

This will cost money and the local authorities are pretending that someone else should pay, notably the utilities so they can concentrate on their more airy fairy functions and prestige projects.

But may I ask, whose money is it that pays for the utilities?