Nottingham City Council leader David Mellen has spoken to the Nottingham Post about the pressures of delivering severe budget cuts across the board, and admitted his “anxiety” that some of the measures taken risk placing vulnerable people, including the city’s children, in more harm.
But with a further set of cost-saving measures worth £12.23m on next year’s budget set to be discussed by the council next week, including major cuts to child services, there are no signs that the council’s austerity drive is due to end soon.
The council’s financial health is under the watchful eye of a government-appointed Improvement and Assurance Board with the powers to make recommendations including calling in commissioners to run council services, a worst-case outcome which Councillor Mellen is adamant to prevent.
He said: “It would take away the democratic control of the council. It’s something we want to avoid at all costs.”
The latest measures include drastic cuts to children and young people’s services , the closure of children’s centres, charges for residential parking permits and a 3% increase in council tax and social care contributions demanded by the authority.
Discussing all the actions taken by the council since it was forced to accept intervention from national government just under a year ago, Councillor Mellen said that he was aware “there is a risk” that false economies are being made, whereby cuts made today are creating problems for the future.
He said: “It’s an anxiety. We are hitting the front line, we are making things more difficult.
“It is difficult for the people of Nottingham to understand that because of shortage of staff their garden waste isn’t collected on a particular Friday and they have to wait another fortnight, for example. It is difficult when a youth session has to be cancelled because we haven’t got the staff to cover it.
“When I became portfolio holder in 2008 we had 100 equivalent youth workers. This proposal is taking it down to about a dozen. We just haven’t got as many people doing the jobs on the frontline out there as we had.
“I am anxious about that, it’s not something we want to do.”
Councillor Mellen said that while the collapse of Robin Hood Energy was “clearly the stimulus” for intervention from Whitehall, the wider context was years of reduced funding for the city council from central government.
Citing an 80% drop in the amount of money the council receives through the government Revenue Support Grant - which he said has been partly political - Councillor Mellen said the council has been forced to take drastic measures since long before Covid.
“It’s been very difficult,” he said. “The cumulative effect on the organisation and our ability to be flexible in our response. It means the organisation has very little resilience.
“It’s been a significant challenge. It’s left the organisation very stretched. As well as taking away front line services we are proposing to reduce the children and youth services somewhat further.
“There is politics involved in terms of the allocation of funding for local government. There’s a sense in which under the Lab government it was felt that cities thrived and that the shire counties lost out and this is about rebalancing it back.
“But there is no comparison in the needs between shire counties and cities like Nottingham.”
Next week the council’s executive board will meet to discuss a wide range of proposals that would lead to additional savings of £13.83 million over the next four financial years.
Of these savings, cuts to children and young people’s services account for £10.16 million.
Among the measures being proposed is the closure of Base 51, a youth support organisation which, the Post revealed in October, could lose all of its funding from the council as of next year.
That decision is listed among the proposals to be discussed by the executive board on Tuesday, November 16th, in a bid to save £740,000 over the next four years.
Other measures set to be put out for public consultation following that meeting include a proposal to scrap children’s play services, and the closure of six children’s centres.
On top of the cuts being made, residents can expect to see an increase of 1.99% on their council tax bills, and a 1% increase in the amount they pay to fund certain services, under the social care precept, meaning an effective 3% increase overall.
Councillor Mellen admitted that the increase would be unpopular with residents, and would be a heavy burden on people on low-incomes in Nottingham, but was adamant that “we have no choice”.
He said “There’s no choice for us in that matter because of the lack of funding from central government. The poorest people will get council tax support so they won’t feel the full effect of that, but there are people who are just above the benefit cap, people who are just about managing.
“It wouldn’t be something we would want to do in an ideal situation but we are in a situation where the government is not funding us properly for services it statutorily expects us to run. In that situation we have no choice but to raise our council tax, as regrettable as that might be.”
The severity of financial measures around the city have led to suggestions of unrest and low morale among the councillors who fear a backlash from voters in the 2023 local elections. Responding to this, Councillor Mellen admitted that there were difficulties politically in making the cuts.
He said: “I understand why some councillors feel that their job is getting harder. We are having to defend decisions that we make collectively which are not good for our community.
“But there are still many good things. We’re still building council houses, but not enough for the number that are being sold through right-to-buy.
"We’ve brought back the Castle, we’ve got developments around here [around the railway station], we’ve got a new library coming to Sherwood. We’re doing well on our carbon neutral ambitions, we’ve got more Green Flags in our parks than any place other than London and Edinburgh.
“But that doesn’t take away from the fact that the job that people came into politics to do, to represent people in communities, and to help to run the city in the best way possible, is more difficult.
“Of course the people of Nottingham will then have to make a choice in 2023 as to whether they believe that the Labour leadership of the city council has been making difficult decisions in hard circumstances as best they will.”
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