In the Tory party leadership contest you didn’t hear about, which ended last week, Brexit machismo was not an issue. Promises of fantastical tax cuts and uncosted splurging on farmers and fishing weren’t on the agenda either. In the other leadership battle, key issues wereongoing austerity, the social care crisis, and councils going bust. This contest (unlike the one you have heard of) requires a successful candidate who is, as one insider said acidly, “engaged with reality”.
As currently the biggest group in local government, Tory councillors got to elect the Local Government Association (LGA)chair, who represents English and Welsh councils of all political hues. Cllr James Jamieson, the Tory leader of Central Bedfordshire council, beat Hillingdon deputy council leader, David Simmonds, and Sevenoaks district council leader, Peter Fleming. As chair Jamieson’s first task will be to tell the next national Tory party leader (and theUK prime minister) that nine years of austerity has taken council services to the edge of viability. In short, without urgent action, Northamptonshire’s effective bankruptcy won’t be a one-off.
There is a sense of despair across local government that no such action is forthcoming. The government spending review planned for this year offered a sliver of hope that a relentless near-decade of municipal neglect might be over. The review was supposed to happen before the summer, but was delayed until the autumn; most in local government fear that with a new prime minister and an October Brexit deadline it will not happen at all. Nor will there be clarity about other key elements of councils’ longer term financial planning – business rates retention, the fair funding review, and the social care green paper. The best hope seems to be an emergency one-year cash injection, which guarantees only that austerity will not be over in town halls any time soon.
No one should assume that councils will simply tick over until the government . In late autumn, if there is no clarity on funding, councils will have to plan to to decommission services and end contracts before making staff redundant in 2020. The brutal lesson of Northamptonshire county council, which went insolvent in part because its Tory leadership was convinced it didn’t have to make cuts because the government would bail it out with more money, is still strong in the memory.
The outgoing LGA chair, Lord Porter, a straight-talking, pragmatic Tory, warned MPs last month that people would die because of social care underfunding. He pleaded for budgetary clarity: “Even with the uncertainty of Brexit, somebody must have a cunning plan.” One thing we’ve learned from the Tory leadership contest you have heard of, is that it is entirely plausible that nobody in the government has a cunning plan.
• Patrick Butler is the Guardian’s social policy editor
