THE more doors they knocked, the more despondent the residents became. “There’s no point painting the close in this block,” community development worker JP was told time and time again by glum-looking tenants in the run-down block of flats in Glenrothes. “It’ll be a dump again in no time.”
JP and his department have managed to persuade bosses to give them £10,000 for community improvements in the most deprived area of the Fife town, and they are keen to canvas the views of local people on how the cash should be spent. But the responses show that motivating poor communities isn’t easy. The brutalist architecture appears to have rubbed off on the tenants; they are cynical and downbeat about each other and “the cooncil”, as represented by the long-suffering but ever cheerful JP.
Is it possible to improve deprived communities when public money is so short? How do you even provide services to people who need but don’t necessarily want them? How the heck does JP stay sane amid such relentless negativity? These were just a few of the questions that sprung to mind during this, one of many telling scenes in the first episode of BBC Scotland’s excellent new fly-on-the-wall documentary series The Council.
The programme follows Fife Council workers from bin men to occupational therapists, housing officers to meals on wheels staff, litter pickers to complaint handlers, as they go about their daily business, as well as the residents who rely on the services they provide.
Fife was an inspired choice for this programme, a place that reflects so many aspects of central belt Scotland but sits in the shadow of the big cities and is largely ignored by both the political and media class.
It’s also the country’s third biggest local authority – supporting some 18,000 jobs – with a population couldn’t be more diverse; the north east of the region is as prosperous and genteel as it gets – think St Andrews – while the working class heartlands of the south and west – think Cowdenbeath - are still struggling to recover from the loss of the mining tradition that had sustained them for generations. In the middle sits the new town of Glenrothes, the place where I grew up, a once shiny and aspirational new town that has struggled to find its place in the world.
But regardless of whether they live in the north or the south, every Fifer, like every other Scot, expects the council to deliver quality services, to educate the young and look after the elderly, to provide safe and warm social housing, empty the bins, keep the streets clean, help the disabled, keep our libraries open and lay on sporting and leisure opportunities.
And this is exactly why there has never been a more prescient time for this revealing series to be made. As highlighted time and time again in the programme, by the bin workers and the chief executive alike, local authorities are facing the perfect storm: cuts on top of years of austerity and a seven-year council tax freeze, while at the same time being expected by the public to provide more and better services than ever before. It’s a circle that is becoming impossible to square and you could sense that in the way Fife Council staff – themselves council tax payers, of course - were thinking and talking about how they deliver services.
Fife staff are far from alone in having to rethink service provision, of course. Every single local authority in Scotland is faced with the most difficult of decisions on a daily basis. Indeed, in these very pages today a think-tank is warning that councils face even bigger cuts than previously expected, with up to £750m - representing 10 per cent of local authority budgets – likely to be slashed over the next three years.
At the same time, the news media – and I ashamedly include myself in this - has turned its gaze away from what it sees as rather dull council matters to focus on the post-Brexit constitutional landscape. And although we shouldn’t forget that Scotland’s economy – and thus its public services – will be significantly impacted by the outcome of the ensuing wrangles, we must look local.
So, as we brood about whether it will be a hard or soft Brexit, about whether President Trump will build a wall or not, we should also remind ourselves to stress about less sexy problems closer to home. And top of that list should surely be how our councils will raise the funds to provide the public services we all rely on.
As a start, I’d recommend watching The Council. Eventually JP managed to bring the residents round – the money he’d fought hard to get was spent on a range of improvements including painting the closes in the run-down flats and a planting a community orchard. His stoicism is a lesson to us all.
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