As Welsh councils prepare for the announcement next week of the Assembly budget, and brace themselves for what is likely to be the lowest annual increase in funding for local government since devolution, I can’t help but wonder if the Welsh Assembly Government will spare itself from the same level of pain that the front line services we provide expect to have to suffer.
It is well known that a couple of years ago, for instance, WAG invented a new inspection role for a group of civil servants in its education department when the previous work they had engaged in had come to an end. The business case for the new role was questionable and there is no doubt in my mind that the money spent on it could have been better put to use being passed onto local authorities to in turn pass on to schools themselves.
But of course that could have meant WAG would have had to consider making some civil servants redundant – something it perhaps didn’t want to face.
Unfortunately, for local councils, that’s not a choice we can generally afford to make. For us, keeping people in employment we don’t have a need for is something that can only generally be achieved at the expensive of cutting something else in the way of local service provision.
And let’s not forget that local councils operate at the coal face of service delivery – services such as teaching, social services, street cleaning, waste collection, libraries and leisure centres, to quote just a few examples. If we cut back our services, then people notice.
Just this week, I attended a meeting of the grandly-titled South East Wales Ministerial Spatial Plan Group and wondered how much effort seemed to have been put in by civil servants in working groups drawing up report after report to place before us of questionable value. Many of the reports didn’t even illicit any discussion.
And whist it might be nice to document work that is going on across the region in different areas of policy, such as the report on a new environmental network for South East Wales, I have to seriously question to what extent these networks and reports actually deliver real improvements on the ground.
I couldn’t help but ask myself if the Spatial Plan process was little more than a huge talking shop that is achieving little more than generating meetings and producing reports for the sake of generating meetings and producing reports – as well as perhaps giving civil servants something to do.
That’s not to say there isn’t merit in people across the region getting together to discuss joint working. The local government-led Connecting South East Wales Partnership Board is already doing a sterling job in taking forward a number of important collaborative projects between different local authorities in South East Wales.
But then that Board has been established with a clear purpose in mind – not just to give a WAG Minister something to chair.
As I write, local authorities in Wales are bracing themselves for the tightest funding settlement most of us currently in office will have ever experienced. My own authority has already taken the unprecedented step of writing to all its employees to ask any who may be interested to put themselves forward for voluntary redundancy.
It goes without saying that we will not simply allow just anyone to leave the authority and that all applications for voluntary redundancy will have to be balanced against the impact on service delivery, with a particular desire to protect posts at the front line.
But with most of our expenditure going on salaries, we know we will have no real choice but to accept we will have to cope with a slimmed down workforce as the funding coming from central government gets ever tighter.
So as WAG ministers are dotting the ‘i’s and crossing the ‘t’s on their draft budget proposals for 2010–11, I can’t help but wonder if the concerns I have will be taken on board and that the pain of the reduced settlement being passed on from the Westminster Government will be shared equally across public services in Wales, including those in WAG’s direct control.
Or will it be the case that the WAG civil service machinery will continue to receive a degree of protection that staff working in front line provision in local councils can only dream about?
Politicians are always talking about cutting bureaucracy and administration in order to protect front line service delivery. It’s time for WAG ministers to show that they mean it.
Rodney Berman is the Liberal Democrat Leader of Cardiff Council and the leader of the Welsh Lib Dem Group on the Welsh Local Government Association
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