I recently spoke at an event organised by the think-tank Centre for Cities in Liverpool, titled ‘The end of austerity?’. We discussed Prime Minister Theresa May’s claim, made at the Conservative Party conference last year, that the decade of cuts in public spending are over.
It is a boast that rings hollow in Liverpool.
Just this year we have had to make another £30million of savings, bringing to two-thirds the total amount of central government funding we have lost since 2010.
The numbers are eye-watering: when you take into account inflation, we now have £436million less to spend per year than we did in 2010. Around 3,000 of our staff have gone, and we have reduced many non-essential services.
Throw in the impact of welfare reform and the disaster that is Universal Credit, and you find an entire city that is caught in the eye of a perfect storm. Our own cumulative impact assessment estimates that 55,000 households – many in low-paid work – are increasingly struggling to make ends meet.
And it’s not just the council – our partners at Merseyside Police have also seen massive reductions in funding leading to consequences such as an increase in knife crime, and struggling to counter the challenge of young people getting involved in gang crime and being exploited by criminals. This is the consequence of cutting police numbers and forcing councils into reducing support services and interventions to divert young people away from crime.
There is rising demand for services such as social care: we’ve seen the number of young people coming into care increase from 850 to over 1,300 in the last 10 years.
In the face of the cuts, we are constantly having to innovate and find new ways of working to protect the most vulnerable in our city.
It’s why we’ve decided to find the money to recruit 160 additional children’s social work staff to reduce caseloads, improve support for young people and increase early intervention – our hope is the investment will stem the tide of those coming in and getting children back with their families more quickly.
In the wake of new research from the Institute for Fiscal Studies about the benefits of Children’s Centres, I am proud that we have managed to keep all of ours open.
It’s why we’re picking up the tab locally for the impact of welfare reforms by helping people in crisis through our Citizen Support Scheme, Hardship Fund, Council Tax Support Scheme and are also spending £12 million a year preventing 6,000 people becoming homeless.
It’s absolutely perverse that councils already hit by swingeing cuts in funding are also having to pick up the pieces of cuts made by other Whitehall departments in order to prevent the social consequences of the poorest families ending up on the streets.
But we can’t keep this up forever.
We are fast approaching a huge crisis, even before you factor in the massive economic uncertainties that the mess of Brexit presents us with.
We can’t keep being given short term funding measures to fix what is a long-term issue.
The Chancellor has hinted at a three-year Comprehensive Spending Review, but this is simply not good enough.
How can we plan for the future when we do not know how much money we will have to spend?
We want a return to an era where councils devised their own practical solutions to problems, rather than having them handed down by central government. The Treasury needs to trust local government and give us more powers and freedom over resources.
Progressive Conservatives like Lord Heseltine get this – I was with him recently when he urged Mayors such as myself to make ourselves “bloody difficult” by loudly making the case for decentralisation.
In my view, we need government to announce a “Generational Bond” of 10 or 20 year fixed funding to allow us to make a real difference.
Because we can’t continue to paper over the cracks of austerity for much longer.
Joe Anderson is the mayor of Liverpool