Numbers Game

If yesterday's Cambridgeshire County Council meeting was dramatised as a Hollywood movie, the trailer would sound a little like this:

Fifty-four councillors...
Nine and a half hours...
Two arrests...
£161 million cuts over five years...

ONE BUDGET

The full details of Cambridgeshire County Council's budget can be found here. I've been trying to digest what they mean. The meeting really did last until 8pm and was repeatedly held up by hecklers. Amongst all this kerfuffle, the council meeting discussed the budget by five service areas.

Children and Young People's Services will no longer be universal, but rather targeted at the most vulnerable. This includes Connexions, Youth Service, and Children's Centres. Services that are currently provided to all schools will also be targeted in this way, notably transport to school. Subsidies for music activities will end. Capital funding for new schools has all but disappeared, so the need for more school places 'may mean mobile provision in the medium term'. Non-urgent repairs and improvements to schools are to be delayed until more money becomes available.

Community and Adult Services take up the largest proportion of council spend, as it includes care for the elderly, disabled, and abused. Almost all adult social care services are already outsourced, so there is little the council can do to reduce their cost other than asking providers to find efficiency savings. The emphasis is on trying to prevent the need for costly care, by encouraging continued independence. The so-called 'offer to users', in other words the extent of support available, will reduce by 25%.

Community and Adult Services also includes libraries, which will see a 40% cash reduction in their budget over five years. 13 libraries in the county are under review; if they cannot be integrated with other local services or run by communities, they will close by April 2012. The frequency of mobile library visits will be reduced by 50%.

Environment Services cuts include the complete phasing out of bus subsidies, reduced road maintenance, fewer road safety campaigns, and the removal of universal road safety education in favour of targeting 'accident clusters'. The Trading Standards service will be restructured and reduced. Spending on the environment and climate change will be cut by nearly half a million.

Corporate Services includes the back office stuff like coroners, customer service, scrutiny, and democratic services. All of those areas are being reduced, as well as communications, emergency planning, and IT (which will cease to exist as a separate team and be cut by 35%). This rather unsettling phrase sums it up: 'there will be a move towards greater self-sufficiency and uniformity'. Opening hours for contact centres will be reduced, with the aim of ensuring as many people as possible get information online. The council will stop publishing magazines, reduce building maintenance by 38%, and stop any work on energy management. Several offices will be closed.

The final service consists of everything shared with Northamptonshire County Council, in a scheme that was designed to save money before anyone even knew to fear Eric Pickles. It covers things like legal services, human resources, finance, and procurement. Cost savings will be squeezed from here too, by reducing management and improving use of technology.

The documents available to the public don't specify which services the 450 council employees are being made redundant from. The answer is all of them.

Councillors obviously had incredibly difficult decisions to make, faced with £50.4 million savings to be found in a single year. Towards the end of this epic meeting, though, they really misjudged the public mood by overwhelmingly voting against a 5% cut in their allowances, proposed by the single Green councillor. If life was indeed a Hollywood film, at this point someone would have stood up and made a stirring speech about how we're all in this together and the motion would have carried. However this is the real world and the meeting did not end on such a happy note. So if you live in Cambridgeshire, make the most of your local library, rural bus services, specialist teaching, and transport to school now. Soon they will be replaced by the Big Society, or not.