The elephant in the room

I read this with some horror. It's by Tracie Evans, director of finance and commercial services at Barking and Dagenham... you know, the London borough that would have fallen into the hands of the BNP last month if it hadn't been for half the London labour movement turning out week after week to campaign against them - where are the thanks?

Anyway, as well as revealing that on her bank holidays she sips sparkling mineral water and covers up with sunscreen (so responsible), Tracie says:

...the Government will give us an in-year savings target and we will make them from wherever we can, although clearly, frontline services are also out of scope for savings.

So, where does that leave us? Up the Swanny without a...

Well it’s obvious, we can make even more back-office efficiencies on top of the ones we have already been making over the past few years. But seriously, how are we going to find an unplanned few million pounds. Perhaps it really is time to flush out all of those issues that have given local government its bad name in the past.

I would like to start to tackle the really big elephant in the room – staff terms and conditions. Government is consistently lambasted by the public for the generous conditions it allows its staff at the expense of the taxpayer – regardless, actually, of whether our overall conditions are, in fact, still that generous. Are we really ready to start increasing working weeks, reducing allowances, decreasing leave entitlements and probably the most contentious, abolishing free staff car parking.

Very droll. The last bit, not what went before.

It is in our interest to ensure that as little money is spent on back-office functions and as much money as possible is spent on service delivery. It is time to tackle the really hard stuff. Onwards and upwards – any other boroughs fancy a merger?

The elephant in the room, my arse. A herd of elephants is roaming around Westminster, tearing up trees and crapping all over College Green. Has been since the general election.

Why do public services have to pay the price of the bank bailout and all the crap that went before that? That's the real elephant. I remember how hard they pushed credit at us - "Why wait? Have it now!" - and that was just the advice of my bank to its high street customers. Never mind the rest of the rubbish that went on.

Now they are building up their reserves again, preparing to pay dividends to shareholders, and paying top bankers big bonuses.

But John Burgess, secretary of Barnet Unison branch, describes the scandal rather better than I can do in my current, rather ranty mood.

£1.3 Trillion (1,300,000,000,000,000) public money given to the banks.

£153 Billion (153,000,000,000) the Public Sector deficit that is driving the Con-Dem Governments Cuts Agenda

If I didn’t know better I sometimes feel the politicians almost relish the massive cuts packages they have been promoting for almost a year! Now is not the time to panic, and scaring citizens that we could be worse than Greece is just the act of a bully hoping that when they announce the cuts we will all roll over and accept anything they propose.

We must not roll over. When I return from UNISON Conference I hope to report that our newly elected General Secretary will have provided a plan for how we are to defend public services and jobs.

...I don’t know if it is just me but I am getting increasingly irritated by politicians talking about cuts in the public sector. What annoys me the most is how they talk about cuts to jobs and job creation in the same sentence! Just how does making 300,000 jobs redundant create jobs?

...I know what I don’t want to hear, I don’t want to hear politicians trotting out glib sound bites like “more for less!” Where does this myth that council workers have been having it easy all these years come from? We may have the easyCouncil tag but working in Barnet is not easy - it is hard work. Everywhere I go to meet members I hear the same message: ‘over worked, not enough time in the day to do the work.’

It's an ill wind... it certainly is!

A very interesting (not necessarily good) article in the Guardian about a conference to discuss the challenge to local government finances, and the opportunity it provides to innovate, transform service delivery, personalise services, yadda yadda yadda. I can only concur with the first comment on the website:

Cynical old me sees a brand of disaster capitalism there. Excited by the recession? Maybe with an eye to your business, but ...it's having an appalling effect on the lives of the public and service users of all hues.

Your favourite and mine, ex-Barnet council leader Mike Freer tries his tired joke about the joys of personalisation on an audience of "senior council officials, civil servants, policemen [sic], charity leaders, new media experts, directors of private sector outsourcing companies and consultants, and other delegates from a variety of fields":

Building on the experience of personal budgets, which had led older residents to choose to pay for trips to the seaside and dance classes, rather than day centre services, he suggested that residents should decide – sometimes street by street – on the level of provision they required.

I can tell you now, Mike, that we all require a good level of service provision, but only some of us are going to be able to afford to pay for it (and those that can might well resent having to do so, when they are already paying council tax).

With the local papers full of stories about what a mess Burnt Oak is, for example, we have to wonder how it is going to get cleaner - we'll have a whipround shall we? If we can't afford to, it isn't, necessarily, because we don't require or value a pleasant environment.