Comment: These are hard times, as the Westminster government struggles to find a solution to the economic crisis.
Richard Kerley
These are hard times, as the Westminster government struggles to find a solution to the economic crisis, the Scottish Government tries to get agreement on a Budget, and your local council is struggling to make the books balance without cutting services too much and keeping the council tax frozen for another year.
Councils all face a multiplicity of financial pressure at the moment. They are beginning to suffer income impacts from business closures that will, where the council is the landlord, see reduced rental income, and everywhere a reduction in business rate income.
The knock-on effect of the economic crisis through unemployment in private households will also be serious, with greater numbers seeking housing and council tax benefit. For those councils with major capital investment planned, the slide in property values and the ability to sell surplus land will represent a serious hitch in all such plans, including those for the 2014 Commonwealth Games.
At such a time, there are bound to be voices raised again about the possibility of reducing the number of councils - something that the Scottish Government has firmly pledged not to consider "in the term of this parliament". Of course, 2011 is not so far away now and, if the concordat with local government collapses, this may be an option that is back on the table for any post-2011 government .
Reducing the number of councils in Scotland is appealing, but at a very simplistic level. For a start, the discussion of 1992-94 that eventually produced our current 32 councils saw government projections of cost savings that were rubbished by a very detailed commentary, and no substantive savings were achieved through that re-organisation alone.
But if councils are required to reduce costs, then there are some options worth exploring, even if the conclusions of any such reviews may be unpalatable to some.
A radical move would be to recognise that what counts for many citizens are "front line" services, and far more pressure can be put on consolidating and sharing "back office" activities. Glasgow and Fife have benefited before from back-office services relocating from the south of England.
Sharing such services and moving location to the depressed parts of north or east Ayrshire or parts of the Borders would save costs and create employment in areas less resilient in hard times than the big cities are.
As councils face ever greater limits on their discretion to raise taxes, they will explore all other options, such as stricter criteria for some services, rationing, and increasing fees and charges. The last option may be rational but not too popular; increased charges for home care was the central issue in the recent Fife by-election, with the local council leader the loser.
The much bigger and much longer-term discussion we really need to have is about what we want councils to do and how we finance them to do that: a review of both function and finance that, for some reason, governments have resisted for the past 50 years, as the Westminster and Scottish governments do even today.
- Richard Kerley is vice-principal at Queen Margaret University, Edinburgh. His recommendations led to the introduction of proportional representation and the single transferable vote in Scottish local government.
