These all look like cuts to parts of local government who, going by the descriptions, are there to do good things that I’m sure everybody would like to see well-funded and effective.

I think we might have more of an idea of bad these cuts are is you gave us data such as what percentage of the relevant operating budgets these cuts represent (like you do for Connexions).

And we don’t know whether there are efficiency savings that to be found. Is there any overlap, inefficiency, excessive management overhead etc.? We don’t know whether these departments (Assessment & Protection Staffing, Safeguarding Management Staffing, Third Tier Family Support) are tightly run organizations, doing fantastic work with real impact, or are bloated and ineffective pen pushers achieving the square root of fuck all anyway.

This is why, imho, even with the cuts reported here, in places that seem to be directly hurting the vulnerable, it’s quite hard to know what damage cuts are doing, and hard to communicate it, especially if there’s a general perception that government does tend to be inefficient and ineffective. If you start from that position, how are you going to be persuaded otherwise?

Luis Enrique

The information I’ve provided is what the council provided in its documentation. I’m fully aware of your points regarding percentage cuts and evaluations of performance – however, there are three points I would make that may address some of what you raise:

1) The quotes I have used are the council’s own assessment of the impact of the cuts – so where it says that cuts to staffing budgets will ‘reduce our capacity to manage the assessment process of children in need’, that’s the council talking, not me. The council itself recognises that these cuts will have a frontline impact

2) No other council I have come across so far has made cuts to domestic violence funding, and none have made such across-the-board cuts to funding for ‘looked after children’ – that’s not to say such councils do not exist (I’m sure there are one or two here and there), but certainly very few councils are going after these budgets. Personally I’m opposed to the broader cuts agenda, but even accepting the government’s cuts, Buckinghamshire has chosen to target these budgets. It is a choice few others, if any, have made.

3) In terms of efficiency, it’s worth remembering through all of this that many councils have been on efficiency drives for a number of years – either genuinely making things more efficient, or alternatively just cutting frontline services (see Kate Belgrave’s archive) – but either way, there’s not likely to be much ‘fat’ left (if any existed in the first place) after so many efficiency drives have already taken place.

Thanks Chaminda

yes I appreciate that, and point 2. is notable. But point 1. isn’t going to convince anybody who believes the council does lots of ineffective things that ought to be cut – of course an organization that purports to help young people is going to say “these cuts will stop us helping young people!”, and likewise with point 3, these claims are hard to get a handle on – efficiency drives are ever present, and aren’t quite the same thing as auditing effectiveness and shutting down ineffective departments.

I’m quite prepared to believe the cuts you report here are simply taking effective organizations (at least, as effective as can be expected) reducing their capacity, meaning fewer people in need of help get it. But I do have to take it on faith somewhat (I don’t know) and that’s kind of my point, none of us (unless we’ve got direct experience – and direct experience of government does not always leave one convinced of its efficacy) can really know, so we’re left relying on our general impression of government efficacy. I was really just commenting on how difficult it is to obtain and communicate information about government efficacy.

In terms of point 1 – I think we need to be clear that this is a council document setting out the impact of the cuts it is choosing to make, rather than a council document setting out the impact of cuts it is trying to resist or condemning. If anything, the council’s agenda in this event would be to play down the impact – but given that these reports are produced by senior council officers, it’s probably more neutral than that.

Re point 3 – well, efficiency drives are meant to be based on effectiveness, although in reality they are often a cover for bog standard cutting. I agree, there is a difficulty in accessing data to show performance, and councils don’t make enough information readily available.

But this is all detail. We shouldn’t lose broader sight of what’s happening – councils are making sweeping cuts, and will make even more severe cuts in future, not based on trying to improve efficiency but based on massive budget cuts imposed from above. The chances of much needed frontline services escaping unscathed, with no negative impact on service users, are somewhere between nought and zero.

thanks again, esp. for correcting my mistaken ideas about point1.

Some of us are old enough to remember when Baby P was the most important issue on here according to the tory trolls.

Oh, the trolls wailed and whined, and demanded all lefties get on their knees and say prayers to the good Lord for forgiveness for the poor baby P. Lefties don’t care about vulnerable children they claimed.

Fast forward to now, and we see the vulnerable can go screw themselves. As always with Conservatives follow the money.

Another way of looking at these cuts is to count the job roles that are being eliminated. Given that the cuts are being made in social services, the savings (£1.029 million) will be mainly employment costs. The employment cost of a social worker is about £35,000 (employment cost is not salary cost), so 30 job roles are being eliminated.

Redundancies are unlikely. Buckinghamshire employs enough social workers that when a job is eliminated, the worker can transfer to another role.

The amount of social work required in Buckinghamshire will not change. Somebody else does it or it doesn’t happen or the work falls on a voluntary agency. There may even be some efficiency savings to mitigate the pain. All the same, I wouldn’t want to be a consumer of their services in the immediate future.

For the benefit of Sally: Most criticism of the social workers and doctors who dealt with the killers of Baby P is that the former did not do their jobs.

When local government faces restricted spending, it always seems to target front line services first, rather than concentrating on back office functions. Why? Because it is a shot across the bows of the government – local politicians flexing their muscles.

They know that with the cuts agenda, this is likely to be blamed on central government and they want to force the government to be more generous with our money. Remember that only a smal percentage of overall local government funding is council tax, the rest is issued by central government.
Labour councils will do it for political purposes, Conservatives because they resent the fact that they will have to run services more efficiently and that many are too bloody incompetent to do that, (and perhaps because many are anti coalition and want to see their leader squirm).

Child services is always the front line of attack because it is the easiest emotional argument to press on the public. Nasty Tories eat babies and small children!
In reality, it has been ever thus, whichever party has been in charge in Westminster – it’s all part of the game.

“When local government faces restricted spending, it always seems to target front line services first, rather than concentrating on back office functions. Why? Because it is a shot across the bows of the government – local politicians flexing their muscles.”

Partly yes, but I don’t buy the idea that local politicians are all entirely cynical, or they would have cut vital services in ‘power grabs’ years ago. Perhaps more important is the fact that young people leaving care (and similar groups) don’t have their right to service provision enshrined in a legal contract and are not about to sue the council for breaking it.

One legacy of Labour’s obsession with forcing Councils to fund major projects via ultra-complex public-private partnerships is that the least efficient activities (i.e. those providing the biggest profits to private partners/consultants) will be the most protected from cuts. The companies and consultants involved will usually have lawyers which are more than a match for a cash-strapped council, and will fiercely resist any cuts affecting their profit margin. Councils will face extreme difficulty cutting their payments to consultants and other private partners, and so the remaining directly provided frontline services must absorb nearly all of the cuts.

Chaminda

137 women sought refuge from domestic violence in the Buckinghamshire County Council area during 2007-8 (the figures are on the council’s website).

In the same year there were 244 children with child protection plans (the equivalent of being on the child protection register). Not all of them will be on the register because of physical abuse.

Clearly the domestic violence problem in Bucks is pretty small-scale.

Nevertheless, the council spent £25 million last year on safeguarding children and, according to your figures, £800,000 on various domestic violence initiatives.

Given the size of the problem and the size of the spend, would you consider that Bucks has in the past been spending more or less than, say, a typical Labour council?

How much do you think the council ought to be spending on preventitive measures?