By John Knox
In a macabre version of Pass-the-Parcel, the politicians playing Pass-the-Knife, have left hapless local councillors to implement the government’s spending cuts. Interestingly, councillors are not the ones up for election this spring…..at least not in Scotland. So MSPs can cast the blame two ways - at the Westminster coalition for plotting the cuts and at local councillors for carrying them out.
With councils now having to take the knife to services, like hesitant surgeons, the extent of the damage is becoming clearer. Glasgow
council may have to cut 2,600 jobs, Edinburgh 1,200, Aberdeen 600, Highland 300, South Lanarkshire 340, the Borders 150, Orkney 80.…the list goes on and on.
In all, Scotland’s 32 councils have to make savings next year of £450m, a drop of 2.6 per cent in their budgets. And this at a time when unemployment is already at 8.4 per cent and growth in the economy is at microscopic levels, if
it exists at all.
And as for how these cuts will affect services, we ain’t seen nothing yet.
The examples given by councils, at least in public, are so minor as to be laughable . If you live in Glasgow or Edinburgh, we’re told you can expect your bins to be emptied less frequently. If you live in Argyll you will no longer have a mobile library service. If you live in the Borders, you will need to dress warmly to visit any council building this summer because all the heating
will be turned off. Hardships indeed.
The real cuts will follow. But just sometimes they are revealed, as when Highland council cut the funding for the traditional music school at Plockton, or Shetland announced it was closing six schools or Edinburgh pulled the plug on Blindcraft, the bed-making factory for blind workers which has been going since 1793. So much for nurturing talent or caring for the vulnerable. These
appear to be the first things to go.
This whole cuts process is proving so unreal. I went along to watch the show on budget day in the Scottish Parliament. It opened with a homily from Cardinal Keith O’Brien who was just back from the earthquake zone in Haiti and who spoke of the rebuilding work going on there. It made the efforts of MSPs look so small.
Apparently, just hours before this final debate, the parties were continuing to haggle over £67m or 0.2 per cent of the budget. This bargaining had been going on for three months and yet the finance secretary John Swinney was suddenly able to find all this money, from extra resources no one knew he had !£41 million came from a revised estimate of the amount to be raised from business rates (incidentally, this is more than the £30m he was hoping to raise from the Tesco tax) and the rest came from funds left over from this year.
It thus became remarkably easy to buy the support of the opposition parties.
The Conservatives got £16m extra for housing investment. The Liberal Democrats got £15m for college students. And Labour were offered 25,000 apprenticeships, an offer they ultimately turned down.
As if all that wasn’t bizarre enough, the next day I went along to Edinburgh City Council to watch how one council was dealing with its reduced budget. I took my seat in the gloomy public gallery just as a delegation of parents were asking to be spared cuts to the schools budget. The Blindcraft delegation was next. But £32m of cuts went ahead anyway, on the casting vote of the Lord
Provost.
Edinburgh, like every other council, hopes to be able to make a lot of the cuts through “efficiency savings”, in Edinburgh’s case, £51m out of a £90m reduction over the next three years. I find this an incredible claim, unless “efficiency” has a very broad meaning indeed…including the contracting out of many services. The services, like care for the elderly or dustbin collection, may not disappear but they will be carried out by voluntary organisations or co-operatives or private firms using cheaper labour.
The Coalition at Westminster thinks this is a jolly good thing and this is the ideal time to introduce such reforms. But it is all a huge risk and being taken in such a hurry. What happens if the reforms don’t work ? Large numbers of council workers will thus have been laid off with no jobs for them to go to. And even if the reforms do work, they may not work quickly enough to save the
economy from plunging back into recession.
To heighten the excitement still further, this journey into the future is beginning in thick political fog. No one has yet spelt out the cuts that are going to be made, everyone is blaming everyone else and we are all assuming, in a very British way, that we will somehow muddle through.
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