Policies for Copeland - shared services
One thing we can all agree on is that, whoever wins the local and national elections on 7th May, local services will continue to be under massive pressure.
The present government inherited an enormous national debt which was still going up because of a massive deficit (with found pounds spent for every three coming in) and a country paying more on interest on the debt that the entire education budget.
The measures which have had half the country screaming about austerity have succeeded in reducing the deficit by a third in absolute terms or by half as a share of GDP but that it still too high and means that the national debt is still going up.
It's an argument for another day which of their plans will work, but I want to make the point that Osborne, Balls Alexander and every other political party with the faintest shred of claims to responsibility all agree that the present deficit is still unsustainable and needs to come down further. Which means money is not going to stop being tight and local council budgets will continue to be under massive pressure.
In that context, can Cumbria really afford to have seven major councils (county and six districts)?
I would say certainly not on the basis that all seven try to do everything for themselves. We really do not need seven finance departments, seven legal departments, seven IT departments, seven HR departments, and seven payroll systems, etc, etc, etc.
One possible response to this is to support what are called "Unitary Authorities" where you scrap both the existing county and district councils and set up one or more combined councils which provide all the services currently run at each tier. I absolutely do not rule out the possibility of supporting such a solution on the right basis - if an idea for a "West Cumbria" unitary council and an "East Cumbria" unitary replacing the present councils were to come forward I would probably back it. I didn't and currently still don't support the idea of one unitary council for the whole of Cumbria because I think the area is too geographically big, hard to get round, and diverse for one unitary council to work here. But we have to keep looking at options.
A less radical but potentially very helpful idea at least for the short term would be for councils to share services. There have been some early attempts for Copeland, Allerdale and Carlisle to agree on sharing services. I believe this needs to go much further.
There are a lot of services which can be provided more efficiently and cheaply by the councils of Cumbria working together than by all seven doing everything in-house. That way seven councils does not have to mean seven payrolls, seven property teams, seven HR departments and so on. Sone properly this will enable all the councils in Cumbria to work together to provide better services for all our residents and avoid the need to make more painful cuts.
Doing things the old way will no longer work. We need to work smarter and work together.
The present government inherited an enormous national debt which was still going up because of a massive deficit (with found pounds spent for every three coming in) and a country paying more on interest on the debt that the entire education budget.
The measures which have had half the country screaming about austerity have succeeded in reducing the deficit by a third in absolute terms or by half as a share of GDP but that it still too high and means that the national debt is still going up.
It's an argument for another day which of their plans will work, but I want to make the point that Osborne, Balls Alexander and every other political party with the faintest shred of claims to responsibility all agree that the present deficit is still unsustainable and needs to come down further. Which means money is not going to stop being tight and local council budgets will continue to be under massive pressure.
In that context, can Cumbria really afford to have seven major councils (county and six districts)?
I would say certainly not on the basis that all seven try to do everything for themselves. We really do not need seven finance departments, seven legal departments, seven IT departments, seven HR departments, and seven payroll systems, etc, etc, etc.
One possible response to this is to support what are called "Unitary Authorities" where you scrap both the existing county and district councils and set up one or more combined councils which provide all the services currently run at each tier. I absolutely do not rule out the possibility of supporting such a solution on the right basis - if an idea for a "West Cumbria" unitary council and an "East Cumbria" unitary replacing the present councils were to come forward I would probably back it. I didn't and currently still don't support the idea of one unitary council for the whole of Cumbria because I think the area is too geographically big, hard to get round, and diverse for one unitary council to work here. But we have to keep looking at options.
A less radical but potentially very helpful idea at least for the short term would be for councils to share services. There have been some early attempts for Copeland, Allerdale and Carlisle to agree on sharing services. I believe this needs to go much further.
There are a lot of services which can be provided more efficiently and cheaply by the councils of Cumbria working together than by all seven doing everything in-house. That way seven councils does not have to mean seven payrolls, seven property teams, seven HR departments and so on. Sone properly this will enable all the councils in Cumbria to work together to provide better services for all our residents and avoid the need to make more painful cuts.
Doing things the old way will no longer work. We need to work smarter and work together.
Comments
I am convinced that there are a number of problems with that: particularly that it is just too geographically huge and diverse to be sufficiently local. Partly as a consequence Cumbria has proved that it is not the right geographical area to get sensible decisions about the future of the industry you work for, Jim.
The historic county of Cumberland might just work as a unitary authority, but that would be North and West.
Westmorland on its' own would have far too small a population. You could add the parts of Cumbria which were originally part of Lancashire and Yorkshire: do you see the problem yet?