'Austerity will continue locally,' says councillor

Suffolk County Council is on track to hit its saving plans of £43.13m this year, but one councillor said he feared the pressure might never let up.

The Conservative-run authority has a budget of £752m for 2024/2025 with £65m worth of savings to make over the next two years.

Tory councillor Richard Smith, who is responsible for finance, said he doubted the pressures on council finances would let up and he feared austerity "would continue in local government, just under another name".

The Labour government has committed to not returning to austerity. Minister for Local Government Jim McMahon previously said it had "inherited a crisis in local government".

Suffolk County Council's saving targets for this year and next were announced in February.

Smith said the council was “very close to where it needed to be" to achieve a balanced budget for this year.

He added he was "confident these savings targets would be met" over the two years and that there needed to be "small contributions" to reserves this year.

But Smith was more concerned that reserves were only going in one direction - "down" - and he wanted to make sure they did not get to an “irreducible minimum”.

The council came under fire when it announced its budget savings last January, saying it would cut all its arts spending.

It later reversed this decision, offering a £500,000 fund for arts groups to apply after the last government gave more money to local councils.

The council is under pressure to provide its statutory duties with adult social care and children’s services.

Smith said "each year the percentage that they spend on those services goes up".

"Two years ago it was 73%, last year it was 75% and this year 77%," he said.

"It is a worry and you can see on that trajectory we have spent all our money on social care services and we don’t have any money for anything else."

Andrew Stringer, leader of the Green, Independent and Liberal Democrat group who are the main opposition at the council, said the proposed budget savings from the Conservatives was "hardly cause for celebration".

"This year's budget setting for Suffolk County Council will be a huge challenge, with county council budgets having to pit the needs of potholes against provision of rising adult social care needs," he said.

He was also concerned about the council's £101m school funding deficit and how this would be paid off.

Stringer also believed the reserves were under "increasing threat".

Deputy Labour leader at Suffolk County Council, Sandy Martin, said "it was past the time when there was any sense in cutting council budgets and Suffolk is no exception".

"More and more of the county’s budget is spent trying to deal with the consequences of previous cuts to services," he continued.

"This is most obvious in children’s services. We need a council that focuses on prevention, and we need the government to recognise that councils need more resources."

McMahon said he was committed to ensuring councils had the resources to provide public services.

“This government inherited a crisis in local government and there’s no shying away from the scale and these deep-rooted problems won’t be fixed overnight," he said.

New research by the BBC has found that across the country the financial pressure being faced by local councils is getting worse. All of them are already in the middle of cutting millions of pounds from this year’s budgets but nearly all are predicting a further shortfall in future budgets which is getting larger every year.

The problem is most acute for our county councils and unitary authorities which oversee the big spending departments of social care, children’s services and highways.

Our figures show that in Suffolk the county council which is currently working through £43m of savings, is predicting a cumulative shortfall of £50 million by 2026 representing 6.5% of its net budget. The authority will probably rely on reserves to cover some of that but there will also have to be some tough decisions.

Over the last 15 years, councils have learnt to slim down their back office, reduce services and look for alternative ways of making money. Every year it gets harder.

The new government is promising a longer term funding settlement to help councils with their planning. But could it do more?

Other suggestions include lifting the cap on how much they can put up council tax by or being given permission not to have to balance their budget every year.

And they would all like it if the Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves could find some more money for councils in her budget.

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