Audit Scotland tells us that things are going to get worse for Scotland’s councils. In its 2009 Review it states that councils and services are improving but the scale of the budget challenge they face means urgent action is needed.
The document has been met with a chorus of 32 collective groans. Yes, councils say, we know: it’s bad and we need to expect to have to make more efficiency savings in the future.
But there’s a growing realisation that “efficiency savings” or any other attempt to rearrange what is there to make something leaner and meaner is not going to be enough.
Scary fact number one. In the coming four years the cost of just trying to claw back the national overspend for the UK Government is going to mean some 12 per cent less will be available to be spent on the public sector. That’s 12 per cent less for Scotland and thus 12 per cent less for local councils.
Scary fact two. The changing demographic suggests that if we use the current model to delivery local council services – nothing changed from today – we’re going to have to find 8 per cent more money to do it four years from now. That’s almost entirely because more people will need more help and support from their councils in their older age.
Scary fact three. If you add the first two scary facts together you have an even scarier one: somehow councils are going to have to find 20 per cent more money, somehow, if they are to carry on doing what they are doing now.
The shared services agenda all seemed an interesting idea in the past. Initiatives that allowed savings in back-office functions, for instance, to allow the reallocation of money to the front line were lauded. Several even became reality and councils are cooperating in the delivery of some things. But we still have 32 councils and most of what they do is by them directly for their own population. That interesting idea’s day has come (actually it has probably been).
To make the sort of savings we are talking about is perhaps about cuts instead of “efficiencies”, in which case nothing that isn’t a legal obligation is safe. Some sacred cows should start feeling a wee bit apprehensive.
There’s a fourth scary fact. Council leaders are bracing themselves for the possibility that the books could be reopened DURING this financial year. If a new UK Government wants to, it could decide that it needs to get tough on public spending immediately. A chunk would then come off the block grant to Scotland and, unless the Scottish Government has some wee miracle up its sleeve to cushion the blow, local councils would have to revisit their budgets immediately rather than holding fire until the few months up until the end of February.
This could be a long hot summer for politicians at Holyrood and in Scotland’s “town halls”.
The political ramifications of all this are already intriguing and will get steadily more febrile. Here’s just one: if he plays it right, all this may mean that Alex Salmond’s referendum proposals may do rather better than currently predicted on the basis that a lot more Scottish users of public services may begin to think anything is better than what they are facing under the current arrangements.