CNJ Comment - Crude red pen poised over the council budget

Published: 24 June, 2010

A CHILLY blast from Tuesday’s budget has set Camden councillors on the run. Effectively, the Town Hall has been ordered to cut spending by 25 per cent.

In some areas of expenditure, straightforward, however painful  economies will be imposed. Here, a thick red line will simply move across the page.

Housing benefits will now be capped at lower levels,though the cut-off figures seem to have been arbitrarily arrived at.

How the council will now be able to perform its statutory duties of housing the homeless in the high rental London market remains a quandary beyond the concern of Whitehall. However, inner London councils were, admittedly, trying to square the circle, forever funnel­ling higher and higher “state benefits” into the hands of private landlords.

It would be more logical, of course, to dampen the market by building council housing – but this has been spurned by all governments since the 1980s.

But where will the cuts fall in social services, schools, services for the children and the elderly, sports?
This is what is frantically worrying councillors.

There cannot be a straight red line here. Some services are, in effect, historically ring-fenced; others are too inter-related for such a simple line of attack.

Conflicting advice will be given.

The spectre of a kind of civil disobedience that arose in the mid-1980s could be seen again.

More likely, the Labour majority will adopt a muddled, pragmatic policy in the hope they can essentially protect services until the political climate changes.

This will be a gamble – and it may not come off.

School ties

DAVID Cameron is after Big Government. He wants to trim it back – hence the retrenchment of the public sector.

Though he has far from finished with the  Welfare State.

Yet the same government is embarking on more micro­management of local affairs – this time, the school system.

Though control over the proposed academies will be taken away from local councils and, ostensibly, given to headteachers and various individuals, in practice they will come directly under Whitehall.

Even a school curriculum will, for the first time, be authored by the Department of Education while in the past it had to go through vetting hoops from independent bodies.

Academies, in effect, will become government schools – for the first time in recent history.