“A cold coming we had of it, Just the worst time of the year.” I don’t suppose many of the people looking at the pictures of the eerily empty Forth road bridge and trying to work out how they are going to get to work, or those across the UK whose homes have been flooded and Christmas gifts washed away in a tide of dirty water will think of TS Eliot. But the poet’s bleak view of Christmas is all too apposite in a winter of growing discontent about public services, where the cuts are having an ever-greater bite.
When he introduced his spending review last month, the chancellor George Osborne suggested, in effect, that those who work in public services had exaggerated the impact of the cuts. He didn’t use the term shroud-waving, but he said it was irresponsible to say that cuts to public budgets would inevitably hit public services. Bold reform, he suggested, would enable public services to be both smaller and better.
It’s a mantra that sounds plausible and could even be true, if bold reform were properly thought about, well-resourced and led by politicians with a long-term view of how collaborative, joined-up services could work.
But it’s not the reality of how things feel on the ground floor for public managers. In councils, government departments and agencies, emergency services such as the police and the fire services, and in many other parts of the public sector, managers have spent this year hunched over spreadsheets, trying to calculate the least-worst impact of cuts. It’s an impossible task and less than a month after that statement by the chancellor, we are seeing what cuts look like.
A decision four years ago in Scotland, for example, to cut the maintenance of the Forth Road bridge has caused misery for many since one of country’s main transport arteries closed earlier this month and will remain shut until the new year, costing the economy dear. In Cumbria and many other parts of northern England, people are counting the cost of flooding following a £115m fall in spending on flood defences this year and delays to planned work.
Public managers tend to be pragmatic; they try to make the best of things. There will certainly be some opportunities to make a difference in local areas with the decentralisation of budgets under the government’s devolution plans. Areas such as the Liverpool city region, the west Midlands and west Yorkshire have signed devo deals that will give them more power over transport, skills and training, housing and other services. But many council chief executives fear that extra powers won’t make up for a lack of extra money and further local government cuts.
Again and again this year, local politicians have tried to remind health secretary Jeremy Hunt that without adequate funding for social care, it will be impossible to make the NHS work properly. The police have been warning for several years now that cuts to mental health services, probation and ambulances have left them to pick up the pieces. There’s a very good debate to be had about the changing role of the police, fire services, as well as the role of libraries, parks and other public services in the 21st century. But that debate isn’t happening. Instead, libraries and parks face even more swingeing cuts; and home secretary Theresa May warns the police that they face years of more budget cuts. One of the consequences of the cuts agenda will be a shrinking and demoralised public sector workforce heading into 2016.
Politicians, locally and centrally, have to make hard decisions. Public managers get that. It’s infuriating, though, when politicians don’t listen. Or, worse, when they do, and seem simply not to care. Or, perhaps, like the prime minister, they just can’t comprehend what impact their decisions will have on ordinary people’s lives. Who will forget the inglorious spectacle of our prime minister – the co-architect, one might have thought, of a vision for public service – writing to his own Oxfordshire county council earlier this year to harangue them on cuts, while displaying a woeful lack of knowledge about the impact of his own policies? You couldn’t make it up. Not even Eliot could write a poem about that.
