Agent 151: Dickens & deckchairs

The leader of the council has started identifying with Wilkins Micawber, a character from David Copperfield by Charles Dickens. Micawber is a clerk, known in popular culture for asserting his faith that “something will turn up”. This makes him a very dangerous character indeed for a leader of a council to be modelling himself upon. An attitude of hopeful expectation is almost as difficult for an S.151 officer to deal with as wilful negligence. The fact is that nothing will turn up. There is no white knight on a charger coming to save us. Ask any of the pundits. Ask the Treasury. Ask anyone! There are more cuts coming. We are on our own.

Micawber is also known for another aphorism which is much more to the liking of S.151 officers:

“Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen pounds nineteen and six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds nought and six, result misery.”

That sums it up nicely. Put another way, there is a very simple equation in local government:

Cost of services = Government grants + local income from taxes, fees and charges

This self-evident equation is at the heart of the S.151 officer’s role: we have to deliver a balanced budget. Hopeful expectation really does not have any place in this process, and, indeed, we have to spend a good deal of our time weeding out budget proposals that are not sufficiently evidence-based or sufficiently robust to make the grade. I am pleased to report that thanks to the excellent work that has gone on across the council in preparing the proposals, there is not one ounce of hopeful expectation that has found its way into next year’s budget at this council.

However, I was rather surprised to find that despite having complete buy-in from politicians to our very comprehensive budget process and the need for proposals to be robust and deliverable in relation to next year and the two years beyond, when I broached the subject of how we were going to balance the budget in the longer term they all became very Micawber-like. Indeed, it was as if they had all drunk of the same wine or had caught the same virus.

I simply pointed out that if the current funding trajectory continued, it was inevitable that eventually we would reach the point at which we had pared down all of our essential services to the bone and there were no more cuts that could be made without unpalatable consequences. At that point, the only option would be a referendum for a whopping increase in council tax.

“No, no, no,” they said. “Something will turn up. It has to.”

“But it won’t,” I said.

“Well we must hope that it will.” And that was all I could get from them.

The consequence of this situation is that politicians will be looking for a mythical solution that they will find palatable, and thus they will be at the mercy of all the snake-oil salesmen out there. A commissioning council, that’s the thing! A co-operative council! A new generation council! Strategic partnerships! Transformation! Shared services! Don’t get me wrong – each of the ideas touted as a solution has something useful to offer, but unfortunately that something is not the solution to the funding crisis that is fast approaching. These apparently radical new business models are ultimately equivalent to moving the deck chairs around on the deck of the Titanic.

Our politicians, by which I mean politicians at both national and local level, have to face up to the inescapable end-game of the extraordinary reduction in funding for local services that they have accepted is a necessary ingredient in eliminating the national budget deficit. Perhaps they should be reminded that Wilkins Micawber’s reliance upon something turning up resulted in a stretch in debtor’s prison. The end-game is an adjustment in local taxation that will re-float local services, albeit at the expense of the popularity of the party in power when it happens. In the words of another character from David Copperfield, Mister Barkis:

“It was as true … as turnips is. It was as true … as taxes is. And nothing’s truer than them.”