Anne Perkins writes:
Around the time the Queen was born, when Britain was facing its worst depression in living memory and the Wall Street crash was about to make it much, much worse, it dawned on the people in Whitehall that many local councils were trying to weave services out of thin air.
In areas where jobs were scarce as hen’s teeth and every other working man was unemployed, some places simply couldn’t afford to provide the most basic services.
In response, Whitehall devised a system of sharing local taxes between rich boroughs and poor boroughs.
It was an ingenious idea that reflected and supported a sense of national solidarity that was deepened by the southward tramp of the hunger marches and compounded by the wartime experience of conscription, when the officer class encountered, often for the first time, the face of poverty.
Yesterday, George Osborne sounded its death knell.
Osborne wants a leaner, meaner state, and he wants leaner, meaner local government too. The message in the autumn statement was about devolution and autonomy.
But in the language of the Treasury Red Book, that means cuts: cuts twice as deep as those that have already left town halls excising soft tissue, closing swimming pools and libraries and selling off assets left by the city fathers, such as the endowment of rare ceramics that Croydon flogged to the Chinese a couple of years ago to raise £8m.
On city treasurers’ own analysis, there will be a black hole in local finances so big that even closing every single children’s centre, library, museum and park would not fill it.
It’s a little bit like catching sight of yourself in a window and realising that, yes, 7lbs extra does actually show.
Only this is about something that actually matters to thousands of people.
The Osborne argument would go something like this: look at how well councils have handled the cuts so far, confirming that a) they were flabby and b) they just needed a bit of a kicking to become more innovative and efficient.
Then, he would add, councils will be able to keep the money they raise from their business rates, and they will have the right to raise an extra 2% on their council tax to help with the soaring bill for social care.
They will be able to stand on their own feet, autonomous.
This will be fine in Westminster, and probably in Knutsford, the town at the heart of George Osborne’s constituency; it will probably not be fine in Liverpool or Gateshead or Barrow or Stoke, or almost anywhere where Labour clings to power.
There, councils’ income from business rates – which they will want to keep low or at least to discount in order to encourage more business – will be inadequate, and their council tax base will not generate enough to cover a shortfall in social care funding that is reckoned at £6bn.
There are several aspects of government policy that are truly puzzling, such as giving up on going green. But its approach to social care is mad, or bad, or both.
It ignores the findings of the report it commissioned; it piles on new obligations; it mandates the national living wage and then it pulls out the already threadbare carpet of funding that supports them.
The most generous interpretation is that Osborne believes there will be a resurgence of Edwardian philanthropy to go with Edwardian levels of income inequality.
Maybe that was why he found £5m for the Burrell collection in Glasgow, that enormous assembly of cultural artefacts donated by the eponymous shipping magnate in the first part of the 20th century.
Perhaps he pictures footballers endowing retirement homes and Big Brother winners underwriting children’s centres.
Or maybe he just wants everyone to pay more out of their own pockets. Or maybe, just maybe, he really doesn’t understand what his scheme means in real life.
The way David Cameron doesn’t, as he revealed in his long and bemused complaint to his own Oxfordshire county council leader, Ian Hudspeth.
People used to wonder whether Osborne was talking about a northern powerhouse or a northern poorhouse.
Now we know.
Around the time the Queen was born, when Britain was facing its worst depression in living memory and the Wall Street crash was about to make it much, much worse, it dawned on the people in Whitehall that many local councils were trying to weave services out of thin air.
In areas where jobs were scarce as hen’s teeth and every other working man was unemployed, some places simply couldn’t afford to provide the most basic services.
In response, Whitehall devised a system of sharing local taxes between rich boroughs and poor boroughs.
It was an ingenious idea that reflected and supported a sense of national solidarity that was deepened by the southward tramp of the hunger marches and compounded by the wartime experience of conscription, when the officer class encountered, often for the first time, the face of poverty.
Yesterday, George Osborne sounded its death knell.
Osborne wants a leaner, meaner state, and he wants leaner, meaner local government too. The message in the autumn statement was about devolution and autonomy.
But in the language of the Treasury Red Book, that means cuts: cuts twice as deep as those that have already left town halls excising soft tissue, closing swimming pools and libraries and selling off assets left by the city fathers, such as the endowment of rare ceramics that Croydon flogged to the Chinese a couple of years ago to raise £8m.
On city treasurers’ own analysis, there will be a black hole in local finances so big that even closing every single children’s centre, library, museum and park would not fill it.
It’s a little bit like catching sight of yourself in a window and realising that, yes, 7lbs extra does actually show.
Only this is about something that actually matters to thousands of people.
The Osborne argument would go something like this: look at how well councils have handled the cuts so far, confirming that a) they were flabby and b) they just needed a bit of a kicking to become more innovative and efficient.
Then, he would add, councils will be able to keep the money they raise from their business rates, and they will have the right to raise an extra 2% on their council tax to help with the soaring bill for social care.
They will be able to stand on their own feet, autonomous.
This will be fine in Westminster, and probably in Knutsford, the town at the heart of George Osborne’s constituency; it will probably not be fine in Liverpool or Gateshead or Barrow or Stoke, or almost anywhere where Labour clings to power.
There, councils’ income from business rates – which they will want to keep low or at least to discount in order to encourage more business – will be inadequate, and their council tax base will not generate enough to cover a shortfall in social care funding that is reckoned at £6bn.
There are several aspects of government policy that are truly puzzling, such as giving up on going green. But its approach to social care is mad, or bad, or both.
It ignores the findings of the report it commissioned; it piles on new obligations; it mandates the national living wage and then it pulls out the already threadbare carpet of funding that supports them.
The most generous interpretation is that Osborne believes there will be a resurgence of Edwardian philanthropy to go with Edwardian levels of income inequality.
Maybe that was why he found £5m for the Burrell collection in Glasgow, that enormous assembly of cultural artefacts donated by the eponymous shipping magnate in the first part of the 20th century.
Perhaps he pictures footballers endowing retirement homes and Big Brother winners underwriting children’s centres.
Or maybe he just wants everyone to pay more out of their own pockets. Or maybe, just maybe, he really doesn’t understand what his scheme means in real life.
The way David Cameron doesn’t, as he revealed in his long and bemused complaint to his own Oxfordshire county council leader, Ian Hudspeth.
People used to wonder whether Osborne was talking about a northern powerhouse or a northern poorhouse.
Now we know.
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