Recent announcements by both Mid Suffolk District Council and Suffolk County Council to the effect that they are both going to need to make hefty cuts in their expenditure to deal with reduced income from Whitehall can only mean one of three things. Either they will need to cut waste, raise Council Tax levels in real terms, or cut services.
Raising Council Tax levels isn't that easy. The insistence that any increase above a certain, arbitrary, centrally-defined amount triggers a referendum of voters means that local councillors are loathe to even try - running a campaign against an increase in your tax bill is pretty easy, and most local politicians would rather tell you what they think you would like to hear, i.e. you can have services and someone else will pay for them.
Naturally, if the media are to be believed, there are huge levels of waste in government which could be attacked to protect front line services. Sadly, whilst there is waste, it isn't necessarily caused by bad management, but by the fact that people want services supplied that, were they to have to pay for them directly, they might think twice about keeping.
And as for cutting services, well, most councillors would rather cut their own throats than tell you that's what is necessary. Even were they to be that honest, a political opponent will campaign against them promising to save whatever it is.
As an example, people like libraries. If perceived to be under threat, hundreds will demand that they be saved yet how many of them actually use them regularly? How many of those thousands of books are actually read by anyone? And in an era of Kindles and other e-readers, are library user figures likely to go up, or down? At what point do you accept that the cost of providing a service is too great for the benefits gleaned?
We have grown used, as a society, to the idea that someone else, usually government, will do things for us. Government will keep the streets tidy, so that we don't have to, it will maintain parts of our countryside for public use, build roads to make it easier for us to get places. Littering increases because, it doesn't matter, someone will come and clean the street, we take less care about our surroundings as someone else will, we grow used to having a direct route to places and worry less about the economic viability of having three routes out of a village.
And yet, we complain about the size of government, about its cost, about its remoteness from our communities.
Eventually, we will be forced to accept that, in order to maintain the services that really matter - health, education, social welfare, to name but three - peripheral services might have to go. The prize then goes to politicians who are willing to be honest with their electorate and engage them in the debate about what is core and what isn't. Here at the Creeting St Peter Journal, we're not holding our breath...
