AFTER 14 years at the helm of the local government organization COSLA, its outgoing chief executive Rory Mair has painted a grim picture of the state of local government and public services. Councils are facing their biggest financial challenge in a generation, he says, with cuts to services, cuts to jobs, and no end to the crisis in sight.

However, just as worrying is Mr Mair’s assertion in his interview with The Herald that much of this grim picture of crisis and cuts is invisible. He points to the publicity over the 600 job cuts at Shell and compares it to the relative silence that has greeted 10,000 jobs that have gone from local government. He also points out that the cuts to council services have affected the poorest in society most, which means, in Mr Mair’s view, that the fairly well off in Scotland may not even have noticed the council cuts happening.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Mr Mair says the answer to the crisis is for local authorities to retain more control over public services, but his intervention could not be more timely. The profound effects of cuts to council services are being felt across the country by the most vulnerable in society and yet there is a lack of action by government, at Westminster and Holyrood, on some of the key policies that could help. It cannot go on like this.

The assertion by Mr Mair that councils should have control of services must be part of the solution. For seven years now, local authorities have been held in the vice of the council tax freeze, but the days of the policy are numbered. The Scottish Government’s own poverty tsar Naomi Eisenstadt has called for an end to the freeze and for good reasons: it hits poorer households harder than the most affluent by forcing councils to cut services while protecting the incomes of the better off. Councils should be allowed to set their own budgets at levels that reflect what they need to provide vital local services.

But an end to the council tax freeze is only one of the steps the Scottish Government should take. Just a few days ago, Ms Eisenstadt called for fuel poverty programmes to be targeted at helping the poor on the grounds that at a time of tight resources, it cannot be right to hand £300 a year to the better off, and yet the government has dismissed the idea straight away. Again, it cannot go on like this and we must ask whether universal benefits are sustainable when more than half a million Scots are living in severe poverty.

Of course, an end to the council tax freeze and reform of universal benefits are only two parts of the big picture. Progress on tackling poverty will always be slow as long the UK Government sticks to the worst excesses of its welfare reforms; there has also been a severe lack of progress on in-work poverty and low pay and the minimum wage must be raised to a level that reflects the true cost of living.

But the message from the likes of Rory Mair and Naomi Eisenstadt is now consistent and clear: the cuts to public services are hitting the most vulnerable in society and a lack of reform on taxation and benefits is making it worse. The Scottish Government cannot go on ignoring that fact at the same time as it says it is serious about tackling poverty.