Harrow Council’s eight week
Take Part consultation on the first round of proposed cuts started, ran and
ended without any specific information about the proposed cuts.
As a vehicle for reasoned
consideration, the Take Part Budget Consultation Questionnaire was a travesty.
It listed options that are likely to be divisive, offered them in a confusing
negative form, and asked them twice, as if respondents would volunteer that the
community is likely to be of a different opinion to themselves.
The perversely constructed
questionnaire is likely to have defeated any sensible respondent for other
reasons too. There was no information available about the various options. We
have no idea what the cost of the individual services are, what the scale of
each of the proposed cuts is, how much saving each will create (if any), or what
the trade-offs would be. In most cases it’s “reduce” “close some” or “cut
some”.
How much? How many? Which
ones? How could anybody say how much impact it would have without knowing the
answers to these fundamental questions?
Council has a duty to ensure
that any cuts to services are made fairly and equitably, and for this they need
to be considered in the round.
It is pretty obvious that a
number of the proposed cuts will only effect those that use those services,
starting with the proposed closure of the Emergency Relief Scheme, a service provided only to the most
desperate and one hopefully not needed by most residents. Does this mean that
because most respondents will therefore not answer that closure of the scheme
would impact on their family, that they would be happy for Council to close the
scheme to families in dire need?
On the other hand, cutting
the number of senior managers is unlikely to be an option selected as having
the most impact on respondents either, but (a) they wouldn’t know, and (b) the
Council is increasing the number anyway with its recent high profile
appointment. In any case, it’s not about numbers. It’s about effectiveness. The
question is really, are they doing their job well? Based on these proposals and
this questionnaire they patently are not.
Council department heads have
been working on generating the ideas for these proposed cuts since early this
year, and this is as far as they have gotten. There was no further information
available to respondents to the questionnaire because there is no such
information. None of these ideas have been outlined, never mind detailed. They
are just off-the-cuff suggestions.
There are no costings, no
projected savings, no methodologies, no time scales, for any of the “proposed
cuts”. These will be worked out, sources tell us, once Cabinet has made a
decision about which ones to pursue. Based on what? Based on the information
that will be worked up once the decision has been made. One can sense the
presence of genius.
We don’t even know how much
money this first round of proposed cuts is supposed to save. In the absence of
a target, we will never know if it has been met. If we assume that a figure of
£20 million would not be too wrong (£75 million has to found over 4 years),
some radical thinking, not evident in these proposals, is likely to be needed.
How much does Council hold as
its capital reserve, and should this be the time to consider drawing it
down? At this time of historically low
interest rates, should Council not be securing borrowing at fixed rates to
provide funding for income-generating projects that would increase its revenue
streams in coming years?
The second question of the
budget consultation survey is revealing. “How much, if at all, do you now feel
that you personally know about why the Council is proposing to make cuts of £75
million in the next 4 years?”. The answer of course is nothing, as is
anticipated in the question. The question, however, should have been how much
do you now know about the cuts proposed in this questionnaire? Lamentably, the answer would again be
nothing.
Instead of running costly and
pointless consultations like the Take Part cuts questionnaire, with its
questions posed in an information vacuum, Council should be mounting a campaign
and a legal challenge to get the funding formula reviewed and for Harrow to get
a more appropriate settlement from central Government.
Could do better.
Some service requirements
will have changed over the years and imbalances of provisioning should have been
regularly adjusted as a normal part of progress. Proper analysis of how
services are used requires a little more effort from departmental heads than
the generation of a few vague ideas at a time of crisis. A proper impact study
provides a proper basis for decision making. Anything less is cavalier and
irresponsible.
Out of continuous revision
comes the confident knowledge that services are meeting needs and delivery is
matching requirements. Instead, what we are presented with in the Take Part
project is the sight of a floundering Council, desperate for ideas, having left
its decisions far to late to give them due consideration, and which will
inevitably make knee-jerk responses that could lead to catastrophic mistakes
that save little or no money.
What’s needed is proper,
balanced, fact led analysis, and a sensible unhurried debate. Not a fatuous and
flimsy charade of a public consultation which can only be ignored because it
cannot produce anything of use.
The survey ended on November
8th and a summary of responses will be presented to cabinet on 11th
December. Details will then be produced to explain the decisions Council
proposes to go ahead with, ostensibly, to enable further consultations to take
place.
This new information will
need to be considered by taxpayers at a time when their thoughts are likely to
be focused on Christmas and little else. It should have been being scrutinised
over the months of spring, summer and autumn, but Council officers failed to
produce it. Instead, it is proposed that this vital and weighty decision making
will all be squeezed into the last days of December, and the dark days of
January.
Council has to make its
decisions for the budget by February 2015. It will be the last minute rushed
result that has been a year in the planning.
It’s not too late to start
behaving responsibly and rationally, although that may mean putting off some of
these proposed cuts until they can be properly justified and weighed in the
balance.
