Imagine if the Ministry of Defence was forced to scrap one of its three major services. Would ministers choose to do without the RAF, the navy or the army? This is the type of impossible choice councils have faced as they have lost, on average, a third of their budgets since 2010.
Austerity has bitten hard and although local authorities have stepped up to the mark – innovating wherever possible to avoid losing valued services – the impact has been obvious enough. The pain has been felt by all non-ring-fenced areas of spending: libraries, home helps, roads, parks, playgrounds, culture and waste collections. Even our support for businesses and efforts at regeneration.
Here in Liverpool, we will have lost 58% of our budget by 2017. Just think about that figure. That’s £330m cut out of our local economy. The impacts are obvious. This means job losses (2,200 so far), reduced services and less spending power in our local economy.
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