StemCell Therapy

Councils face an uphill struggle when their budget shortfalls are not covered and local expertise is not trusted by ministers, writes LGC editor Nick Golding.

There has been criticism lately in certain quarters of journalists and commentators for their raising of deficiencies in the national coronavirus response. Questioning and scrutiny are seen as tantamount to treachery, working against the war effort and undermining ministers who face the unenviable task of having to take unprecedented action with imperfect information. Of course, this criticism is misplaced. It is the most fundamental job of the journalist to expose inefficiency, hypocrisy, mistruths and failure and far from being a fair-weather luxury this role becomes even more important during a crisis when such failings have an immediate detrimental effect on wellbeing and even survival.

LGC has been asking searching questions of the government, mainly around two key themes. First, do councils have the funding to protect their communities and, second, is local expertise being used to its full potential and sufficiently supported in an increasingly centralised operation? The answer to both questions from our readership has been an overwhelming no.

Councils have been regularly undermined by the centre

On finance, the mood music was initially positive. When ministers were telling councils to do whatever is necessary to support their place, the implication was their work would be fully funded. It seems communities secretary Robert Jenrick has lost a financial battle with the Treasury and his promise has been diluted to covering the costs of specific tasks councils have been told to do. Any expenditure on top of this will be merely taken into consideration while councils projections of sector-wide multi-billion pound income losses are deemed highly speculative. And it would, we were told, create a moral hazard to bail out authorities that had made unwise commercial investments, upon the success of which they are reliant. Mr Jenrick made no mention of the fact councils have done this the vast majority of them acting responsibly to try to recoup the funding they have lost at the hands of Conservative ministers.

To ignore councils dire straits amounts to delusional, head-in-sand, ostrich leadership. While the exact size of each councils shortfall for the rest of 2020-21 is uncertain, one thing is clear: unless far more funding than the current 3.2bn arrives, councils will collapse and local services will be decimated. Does Mr Jenrick really want that? Councils are having to take decisions now about expenditure for the rest of the year and need a clear commitment that their budget shortfalls will be covered. Mr Jenrick diluted his promises, condemning local service users to misery just as Boris Johnson was pledging no return to austerity, a meaningless statement unless backed by resources.

On the second theme, councils have been regularly undermined by the centre (despite the belated move which went live today for directors of public health to lead on care home testing). Councils have been bypassed on contact tracing, coordination of volunteers and sharing of data for the shielding service. The social care workforce has often been near the back of the queue for personal protective equipment while deaths in care homes were not even included in NHS England daily statistics for most of the crisis to date. And why have we not seen James Jamieson or Mark Lloyd, respectively the chair and chief executive of the Local Government Association, behind a lectern at the Downing Street briefing? They havent been invited because councils are not seen as a sufficiently important partner by the centre.

All of this undermines the effort to reduce the spread and impact of coronavirus. While aspects of the central response have been impressive, government incompetence, wilful blindness and control freakery are hindering councils efforts. Perhaps the greatest challenge now is rebuilding shattered local economies an operation that can only be successful if undertaken by empowered, properly funded local leaders. Every central action needs to be scrutinised, questioned and debated to ensure it aids the local response to coronavirus because at present too many are thwarting it. As Britains Covid-19 death rate soars higher than the rest of Europe there is a moral imperative to ask why? and can we as a nation do better?.

Original post:
The centre's wilful blindness and control freakery hinders the Covid response - Local Government Chronicle

This entry was posted on May 15, 2020 at 7:46 pm and is filed under Blindness. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed. |