Local Councils have borne the brunt of the Coalition Austerity cuts as services like education and health have been ring fenced. In Lewisham, following the setting of our Budget for 2014/15 in February, we have agreed savings of around £97m so far. Most of these have been implemented, with the rest due over the course of the next 3 years. On top of this, our current best estimate is that we will need to make savings of a further £80m between now and 2017/18. But this should be fine because to date, cuts to Council budgets have led to increases in customer satisfaction. At least this is the message that has been put about in the media and seems to have taken root in the minds of the public. I think this is a myth, akin to the one which blames our current national debt woes on the profligacy of the previous Labour Government.
The origin of this myth were various reports by the BBC, eagerly seized upon by David Cameron and other media organisations, based on a poll they commissioned from ICM that was published in October last year. An example was a report by Mark Easton, the BBC's Home Editor, entitled, Public Service Cuts – did we notice?, published on the BBC's website on 9th October 2013. He opened with this:
Many people in the UK think the quality of public services overall have been maintained or improved in the past five years despite government cuts,
before going on to elaborate with this:
It is five years since the bail-out of the banks marked a new era of austerity in Britain amid warnings that deep cuts to state spending would see the standard of public services plunge.
But today's poll by ICM suggests six out of 10 people think service quality has been maintained or improved.
At the time I thought this research told a rather different story and that the claims being made based upon it would soon be seen to be going a bit too far, to put it kindly. Silly me. Nearly six months on and this tale of 'cuts, what cuts?' remains the received wisdom. I would offer 3 points that I think undermine this claim.
Firstly, many of the services that the pollsters enquired about are in the education and health sectors and are therefore delivered by services that have had their budgets protected.
Secondly, despite Austerity, during this Coalition administration, many public services are seeing improvements including the completion of investment programmes, that stem from the policies of the previous Labour Government. In Lewisham, for example, we have spent the last 3 years rebuilding and renovating many of our schools, libraries and leisure centres and improving our housing stock. We are also currently in the middle of replacing all our street lights. This is due to the resources made available by the last government.
Thirdly, the BBC's presentation of the poll results was extremely subjective and, when judged against the actual data, I would say, biased. If you look at the results as they appear in the full report (you don't have to look far – it's on page 1), you will see where the BBC got its 6 out of 10 figure from. ICM posed the following question:
Thinking about public services overall, do you think the quality of public services has got better or worse in the last five years, or has it stayed the same? Is that much or a little better/worse?
In response, 3% of people said got much better, 12% said got a little better and a whopping 42% said stayed the same. So 57% is rounded up to 6 out of 10. What the BBC didn't say was that 20% said got a little worse and another 20% said got much worse, with 3% saying they didn't know. Wouldn't a fairer headline have been:
40% of people think that government cuts have reduced the quality of public services'
followed later by the perfectly fair point that,
Yet, remarkably, 15% of people think that service quality has actually improved.
Perhaps I am in danger of disappearing down a wonkhole here but surely I can't be the only one who thinks that, presented in this way, the piece would have generated a very different reaction?
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