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Successive governments have ducked the issue of changing how local government is financed and determining the powers local elected councillors should have, says Graham Burgess. I was asked this week, ‘How do you decide where to make cuts?' The speed and scale of the savings needed in Blackburn with Darwen – £33m or 25% in the first year, £48m over three years – means the answer is simple. Nothing can be protected. We have done all the things that the Government asked. We share a chief executive, have implemented a radical back-office shared-service programme with the NHS, and have drastically reduced the number of chief officers. If localism is really going to work, it needs to truly free councils from Whitehall constraints and let us continue to be assertive local leaders, who know our area best, can articulate vision and delivery for our communities. Our reserves are tight, and we have a strategic partnership with Capita as well as other shared service arrangements with neighbouring councils. Unfortunately, this still remains a drop in the ocean against the scale and intensity of cuts we face. The explanation is simple – as an area plagued by the legacy of a declining post-war manufacturing industry, Blackburn with Darwen, and many other areas like us, have specific problems which have required specific funding to try and address these problems. And this has been successful. These area-based grants have dramatically improved the quality of housing in the borough, helped create the environment for private sector growth, and placed us as the area with one of the highest increases in physical activity. However, such was the baseline we were at in the 1980s and 1990s, this work remains unfinished. Therefore, to have these grants removed, on top of the general grant reductions implemented across the sector as a whole, has created a situation where we face devastating cuts to services way and above those experienced by affluent areas. We thought our efforts in maintaining a reputation as one of the most ambitious and best-run councils in the country would have protected us – but this was wrong. We remain the 17th most-deprived area nationally. Demand for services has been rising during the recession, but much of the support in place is going to take a battering. We are forced to make bigger cuts in frontline services than would be necessary if we had longer to manage the reduction in a more measured way – this front-loading makes no sense whatsoever. Around 70% of our workforce lives within the borough's boundaries, so the inevitable job-losses will add to the bleak picture for our two towns. The latest count sees more than half of our staff put ‘at risk' of redundancy – we're working hard to try and ensure the final figure for redundancies will not top 1,000, but this is a mammoth task. We are listening to residents and staff to inform decisions as far as possible. Our open style of communication is helping, but the messages remain hard to swallow. It is made all the more difficult by the language which comes out of Whitehall – talk of huge reserves, fat cat salaries, non-jobs – all paint a picture of a sector awash with fat that can be trimmed. However, this is far from reality. The localism agenda offers hope for us to be given the chance to really shape how we can deliver services in future, but for this to succeed, we need root-and-branch reform of local government finance. Successive governments – of different political colours – have ducked the issue of proper structural reform of how local government is financed and the powers local elected councillors could have. The consequences have been the growth in the plethora of specific legislation and targeted grant funding, the withdrawal of which is now such a big part of the problem facing local councils across the country. It is not so long ago that we had the Lyons review. Now we learn that the next, equally-heralded review of local government finance may suffer a similar fate, because of different views within the Government. We must fight as a sector for this next attempt to be equally, if not more ambitious than Lyons was, otherwise we will eventually return full circle to the problems we have today. If localism is really going to work, it needs to truly free councils from Whitehall constraints and let us continue to be assertive local leaders, who know our area best, can articulate vision and delivery for our communities, and undertake the critical role of corralling partners into a positive strategy for the area. Yes, this will now happen, but with a severe contraction in public finance. It isn't helped either by the war of words between the sector and central government, let alone a hostile press and interest groups hell-bent on spewing out loony council stories. It is, therefore, vital that we do all we can to prove the doubters wrong and show we are perfectly capable of transforming our areas, regardless of the cuts we face. We can and must lead our staff and our communities through the next few years of very tough retrenchment, but there is still a bright future for councils which do this, and do it well. It will be hard – very hard – but I'm confident we have the talent and determination within local government to meet this challenge head on. Graham Burgess is chief executive of Blackburn with Darwen Council, and NHS Teaching Care Trust Plus

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WHITEHALL

Let's escape from Whitehall

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