All Star Trek fans know that the original Starship Enterprise had a five-year mission “to boldly go where no man has gone before”. Sticklers for the unsplit infinitive remember that, too. After five years of unprecedented spending cuts, a key question for the general election campaign ought to have been whether the starship coalition has boldly gone and left our public services in a place from where there can be no return.
Setting aside the heat and noise over the totemic NHS, the state of the public services has barely registered in the campaign. The Liberal Democrats belatedly made an end to public sector pay restraint a “red line” for any negotiations on a renewed coalition, a move that may garner a few extra votes in their key marginals, but in most respects the cuts have been a dog that hasn’t barked.
When you think back to 2010 and the dark forebodings then about what the coalition’s cuts regime would do to the public realm, this is at first sight remarkable. But if there has been little audible outrage in the past few weeks, it’s not that services haven’t been hit: an audit of cuts in England published on Wednesday by the trade union Unison lists 578 closed children’s centres, 467 libraries and 361 police stations. It’s that local councils have so far done an extraordinarily good job of mitigating what by April next year will have been a 40% reduction in their core grant funding.
Some commentators point to surveys suggesting that much of the electorate hasn’t noticed the impact of cuts on services. They conclude, wrongly, that this must mean there was plenty of fat to go at – and that there remains yet more to trim.
The reality is that councils have boxed and coxed to protect the most vital frontline services. The infamous “graphs of doom”, showing how everything else is incrementally going overboard to ensure continued delivery of essential child protection and adult social care, tell the true emerging story. And as the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) reminds us, we are scarcely halfway through the cuts necessary to balance the budget by 2018-19 as the Conservatives propose.
Against this backdrop, probably the most significant new research to emerge during the campaign came last week in the medical journal the Lancet, where researchers from Imperial College venture that average life expectancy in England and Wales is improving much faster than official estimates.
By 2030, they forecast, women will live to 87.6 years (one year more than the Office for National Statistics expects) and, most significantly, men will live to 85.7 years (2.4 years more, closing sharply the longevity gender gap).
The ageing society is the number one issue for our public services. Nothing happened under the coalition to alter the judgment of the Filkin committee in 2013 that government, central and local, was “woefully underprepared” for the challenge. And nothing has happened in the election campaign to suggest that may change any time soon.
To get into some sort of shape to respond to the needs of an older nation, local government needs a good measure of financial certainty.
It needs to be able to make long-term plans to innovate and to integrate services, not necessarily on the radical Greater Manchester model, but according to systems and networks that suit the profile of local populations and “place”.
David Cameron talks beguilingly of having to cut further only £1 in every £100 of government spending for the next two years. But the TUC reckons it would be nearer £4 in every £100 and the IFS says it would mean that “unprotected” government departments – including communities and local government – face cuts of 18% through to 2018-19 and a cumulative 33% since 2010.
As Scotty, the Enterprise’s long-suffering engineer, used to warn Captain Kirk as he pushed the starship to ever greater extremes: “She cannae take any more, captain! She’s gonna blow!”
