More on the state of rural Britain today – Owl

Somerset Council declared a financial emergency in November 2023, meaning major cuts to services are expected

Somerset Council has said it needs to find £100m to avoid going effectively bankrupt.

The council has found £35.2m of proposed savings.

They include shutting five of the county’s 16 recycling centres, ending council funding for public toilets and CCTV, cutting highway maintenance and closing two tourism visitor centres.

Subsidies for bus services will be reviewed and so will support for the county’s theatres, including Taunton’s Brewhouse Theatre’s £119,000 a year grant.

The council could save £165,000 by pulling funding for Yeovil Recreation Centre sports facilities including the county’s only public athletics track and hockey pitches which are home to Yeovil and Sherborne Hockey Club.

By Ruth Bradley www.bbc.co.uk

Cuts to services totalling £35m have been proposed, as well as a possible 10% increase in people’s council tax bills.

On 20 February, the authority will vote on its budget for 2024/25.

Here we answer some key questions on what we know so far.

Why is the council in financial trouble?

Somerset Council declared a financial emergency in November 2023.

It had been expecting an estimated budget gap for 2024/25 of £42m but said in November that the forecast had increased to £100m.

The council said the costs of delivering services, particularly adult social care, were rising significantly faster than income.

It has also blamed national factors such as inflation and higher interest rates.

It is trying to avoid effectively going bust and being served a Section 114 notice, as has happened to other authorities like Birmingham City Council.

The council would lose the ability to commit to new spending and take decisions if it was issued with the notice.

Somerset Council is in its first year of operation, having been formed in April 2023 from a merger of four district councils and Somerset County Council.

It says this has also caused problems as it has come to light that all the previous councils managed their budgets in different ways.

Which services could be cut?

The council has found £35.2m of proposed savings.

They include shutting five of the county’s 16 recycling centres, ending council funding for public toilets and CCTV, cutting highway maintenance and closing two tourism visitor centres.

Subsidies for bus services will be reviewed and so will support for the county’s theatres, including Taunton’s Brewhouse Theatre’s £119,000 a year grant.

The council could save £165,000 by pulling funding for Yeovil Recreation Centre sports facilities including the county’s only public athletics track and hockey pitches which are home to Yeovil and Sherborne Hockey Club.

A petition against this has gathered thousands of signatures.

A contract with the RNLI to provide beach lifeguards at Burnham-on-Sea and Brean could be stopped saving £35,000 a year.

Also, three parks could be left open overnight to save money on contractor costs to lock them, prompting concerns over vandalism and safety.

Will I have to pay more council tax?

As well as cutting services to save money, Somerset Council is looking to increase its income.

It is proposing a 9.99% rise in its share of council tax bills, although the council needs the government’s permission to increase council tax by more than 4.99%.

On an average Band D property, council tax would rise by £163.80 a year under the plans.

This excludes projected rises for fire, police and any imposed by town or parish councils on their portions of the bill.

Somerset Council is hoping parish and town councils will step in to pay to keep some services running but that would likely lead to those smaller authorities needing to increase their share of council tax, meaning higher bills for residents.

There would also be increases in fees and charges, including for parking, and the council is planning to take £36.8m from its reserves.

Is the council asking the government for help?

Somerset Council said it had been in talks with Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities (DLUHC) for some months.

It is asking for permission to increase council tax by 9.99%, which the council said would bring Somerset’s charges more in line with other unitary councils and bring in an extra £17m a year.

The council is also asking for something called a capitalisation direction, which is when the government gives permission for capital money to be spent on day-to-day costs.

Capital can be from selling buildings and other assets, and would normally need to be spent on other capital projects.

The council is asking the government for a capitalisation direction of £20.8m.

Or, if the request to increase council tax is not granted, then for a capitalisation direction of £37.9m.

What if the government does not help?

If the DLUHC does not grant either dispensation, the council said it will not be able to balance the 2024/25 budget.

It said it would then be unable to avoid issuing a Section 114 notice, effectively making it bankrupt.

If that happened then the government would appoint commissioners to run the authority.

How can local residents have their say?

A spokesperson for Somerset Council said: “We understand there will be concerns. To be clear, no decisions have been made and will not be until the budget is set at full council on 20 February.

“Somerset Council, and councils up and down the country, are in an unprecedented position due to the rising costs faced by local authorities across the country, largely driven by costs of social care.

“If we cannot set a balanced budget, government commissioners will do it for us, without the local knowledge or concern about the longer-term.

“These are not things that we would ever want to be considering.

“We want hear people’s views. Please take part in the council’s budget consultation which runs until 22 January.”

A new financial year looms. The government is reportedly in the mood for pre-election tax cuts; the opposition talks of iron fiscal discipline. And all around us, a familiar disaster grinds on: constant increases in demand on our most crucial public services, which the financially blitzed councils charged with providing them simply cannot meet. 

John Harris www.theguardian.com

The result is a story that speaks volumes about Westminster’s state of contorted denial: increasing numbers of our cities, towns and counties now face municipal bankruptcy, but no one in any position of national power and influence seems to want to talk about it.

The dire predicament of councils all over England now invites an obvious question: at what point might we collectively realise that hundreds of local crises now add up to a national catastrophe? Our political culture is too Westminster-focused to follow the stories and join the dots; the dreaded term “local government” still causes eyes to glaze over. But all over the country, the picture is now the same, and things are rapidly nearing the point of complete breakdown.

Up until last year, the handful of councils that had issued section 114 notices – a reference to the part of the Local Government Finance Act of 1988 that covers insolvent local authorities – were mostly mired in stories of financial mismanagement. Then came the fall of Birmingham city council, tipped into bankruptcy late last year by its mishandling of an equal-pay claim and a £100m IT project. By that point, a longstanding fear was becoming inescapable: that whatever the faults and flaws of particular council leaderships, a systemic crisis was about to break. The proof arrived when Nottingham city council hit the skids amid talk of a grimly familiar gap between local revenues and the sheer cost of constantly trying to patch up our fraying social fabric.

Nearly one in five council leaders in England now say they are likely to declare bankruptcy in the next 15 months. The latest places to sound warnings about financial collapse include Stoke-on-Trent, Middlesbrough, Somerset, Bradford and Cheshire East. The recently announced 6.5% increase in funds the government gives to councils will barely touch the sides. In both deprived and affluent parts of the country, the millions being cut from local services echo the fiscal savagery of George Osborne’s austerity. This time, however, there is a crucial difference. After long years of endless savings, cuts now automatically entail no end of cruelties, which is why the new Labour leader of Stoke city council has been talking about “unpalatable decisions that will hurt our sense of what is right and wrong”.

How we got here is hardly a mystery. The money councils receive from central government underwent a real-terms cut of 40% between 2010 and 2020. Inflation has put even more holes in their finances, and the pandemic caused a sudden halt to the cashflows received from car parks and leisure centres. Meanwhile, councils have to endlessly deal with the kind of social wreckage that decisions taken in Westminster and Whitehall leave in their wake. If poverty increases, so does the load placed on local social workers, not least those who deal with children’s care. When the mainstream education system pushes kids with special needs out, council budgets take another hit. A great deal of what councils are faced with is defined by one of the deepest stupidities of austerity: the fact that the hollowing out of early intervention schemes – Sure Start is probably the best example – means that people’s problems only get picked up when they reach crisis point, and therefore dealing with them is even more expensive.

As of 2013, councils have been allowed to keep more of the money they receive from local business rates – which was good news for more affluent places, but another burden placed on the kind of areas where such revenues are paltry at best. This unfairness has festered, but even comparatively wealthy areas are now feeling the pinch. Hampshire, for example, now faces a financial gap of £132m. There are plans for the withdrawal of all funding for homelessness services. Street lights are going to be switched off between midnight and 5am. There will be cuts to buses, and school crossing patrols. An estimated 4,000 people are going to be asked to contribute more to the costs of their social care.

Perhaps the most vivid element of our councils’ shared calamity centres on libraries, museums, leisure facilities, parks and what little remains of youth services. As these things are hacked back to prevent the collapse of social care, people will be pushed even further into a dystopia of rusty swings, shut-down swimming pools and the eternal complaint that there is nothing for kids to do – the everyday social reality that has all but defined the last 14 years, and now looks set to get even worse. This is why the neglect of councils’ predicament by both the media and Westminster politicians leaves a huge part of our national condition unreported: if you want to understand why so many voters feel exhausted and jaded, this is a significant reason.

Which brings us to the immediate political future. If – when? – the Labour party wins the forthcoming election, it will not make much progress if it leaves this wreckage to carry on piling up. Its own councillors, moreover, will be among the loudest voices immediately calling for help – but so far, there have been precious few signs that any will be forthcoming. Keir Starmer recently visited Leicester, where he was asked about the Labour-run city council’s fears of bankruptcy and the prospect of deep local cuts, and what he might do in response. His reply reflected that deep-seated belief that voters associate Labour with reckless profligacy, and so any calls to spend money had to be loudly resisted. “We’ll have to live within the constraints of an economy that’s been badly damaged in the last 14 years,” he said. “So I’m not going to make promises I can’t keep.”

The reason he sticks to that line might be understandable, but that does not mean it will survive contact with reality. One Labour council leader I spoke to last week talked about an inevitable shift in his party’s position. “They’re going to be faced with more section 114 notices, and more councils really struggling, so they’re going to have to find some money from somewhere,” he said. “They’ll have to do something.”

That day, I noticed, shadow ministers were hyping up a supposed watershed battle about whether children should be subject to compulsory teeth-cleaning. There, perhaps, is yet another example of the howling gap between the small horizons of our politics and a national crisis that is about to explode.

To put the £60m in context: since 2020, Devon’s total running overspend on the SEND service – effectively debt – has risen to around £127 million, a figure projected to increase to £153 million by March 2024. The amount is more than the county has in reserves. Source.

Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole council featured in this article is not an isolated example, there is one much closer. -Owl

Chaminda Jayanetti www.theguardian.com 

A council has warned that it could in effect become insolvent this year because of the huge financial deficits it has racked up on special education needs, in the latest development in the local government funding crisis.

Most councils in England have overspent their budgets on special education needs and disabilities (Send) since 2015, when the government extended the age range of young people who qualify for Send support without providing councils with the necessary funding. These deficits have fed into councils’ overall education budgets – known as the dedicated schools grant (DSG).

Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole (BCP) council has accumulated a combined deficit of around £60m on its DSG budget in recent years and says it cannot eradicate it without making unacceptable cuts to Send services and mainstream school budgets. Moreover, a recent BCP council report warned that its financial solvency is at imminent risk because of government accountancy rules.

Normally, education deficits impact on councils’ overall financial health. However, because so many councils have been overspending their education budgets, since 2020 the government has put in place a “statutory override” under which these deficits are excluded from assessments of councils’ financial health – in effect placing them “off the books”.

This override, which has already been extended once, is set to run out at the end of March 2026 – just inside the 2025-26 financial year.

“When the statutory override falls away, the accumulated DSG deficit will be greater than the council’s total reserves and the council will technically be insolvent,” the BCP council report says. “If the deadline is not extended, then it is expected that the council’s director of finance would need to issue a section 114 notice in December 2024 as it would not be possible to set a balanced budget for 2025-26.”

Since 2018, eight councils in England have issued section 114 notices, signalling they do not have the resources to balance their budget – effectively declaring themselves bankrupt.

So far none of these have been due to the crisis in Send education, but BCP council’s report shows how the end of the statutory override could trigger more council insolvencies – potentially before the override actually runs out.

The Local Government Association, which represents councils across England, said: “We continue to call for the government to write off all high-needs deficits as a matter of urgency to provide certainty and ensure that councils are not faced with having to cut other services to balance budgets through no fault of their own or their residents.”

Adam Sofianos, who lives in the BCP area, told the Observer that while it was a “comparatively smooth” process to get an education, health and care plan (EHCP) – which details the legally required provision for Send children – for his neurodivergent son in 2021, the system is now disintegrating. “Because there’s no funding for extra staff, the experience now is much worse. The school has only one full-time Send team member to support 600 children. It’s a similar story in most schools across the country: the work has increased, but the workforce hasn’t,” he said. “We’re currently seeking referrals to identify additional needs, but this is a much longer process now.” He also rejected recent claims that Send demand was rising because middle-class parents see EHCPs as a “golden ticket”.

“An EHCP is not a golden ticket or a free pass. It’s a lifeline. It’s a safety net that protects a Send child in their school journey.”

A government spokesperson said: “We are working with councils who are affected by deficits from the dedicated schools grant to ensure they can move to a more sustainable position in the future.

“Councils are ultimately responsible for their own finances, but we remain ready to talk to any concerned about its financial position.

“We recognise councils are facing challenges and that is why we have announced a £64bn funding package to ensure they can continue making a difference, alongside our combined efforts to level up.”

Simon Jupp’s background has always been a bit of a mystery. In this media interview he reveals a bit more.

In particular he declares he is  “a One Nation Conservative who focuses on support that people need and also caring, compassionate conservatism”. He also adds; “I’m also, to a point, a libertarian as well…..” 

He confirms that he has been campaigning in the new Honiton and Sidmouth constituency since last March. (Owl has seen many reports that this has been a lonely experience). Tough luck Exmothians!

He also lists his “record” which looks a lot like “jumping on bandwagons” to Owl who is not impressed, having commented on most of them on the “Watch”.

East Devon MP Simon Jupp urges voters to look at his track record

Will Goddard www.sidmouthherald.co.uk 

The Conservative candidate for the newly created Honiton and Sidmouth seat, Simon Jupp, says he will be “fighting for every single vote” at the next general election, writes Will Goddard. 

The 38-year-old, who is currently MP for East Devon, will face Lib Dem Tiverton and Honiton MP Richard Foord for the new constituency, which will contain parts of both of their existing seats.  

Both have small majorities. Richard Foord won a by-election by 6,144 votes  after the resignation of disgraced Tory Neil Parish in 2022, and Simon Jupp won East Devon by 6,708 votes at the 2019 general election.  

Hot on Mr Jupp’s heels with over 40 per cent of the vote in 2019 was independent Claire Wright, who is endorsing Mr Foord’s campaign. 

East Devon has always been Conservative-held, as had Tiverton and Honiton before the 2022 by-election. 

Mr Jupp, who lives in Sidmouth, said: “I’m currently the only candidate who lives in the constituency.  

“I think that in order to represent an area, you need to live there and on polling day be able to vote for yourself. 

“I’ve been out campaigning since last March and I’m out every single week because I live here, I care about this area, and I really want to continue to serve the people to the best of my ability. 

“Talk is cheap, action is more important. Look at my track record of what I’ve done for the current East Devon constituency. 

“I hope people can make up their own mind that I take action where it’s needed, I stand up for our area because I live here and regardless of anyone’s political persuasion, I will help them.  

“That’s what being a good MP is about. There’s nothing more rewarding in this job than when you can actually make a difference and help people, or you’re successful in a campaign.” 

Mr Jupp, a former broadcast journalist and a political special adviser, describes himself as “proudly a One Nation Conservative”. 

He continued: “I believe in personal responsibility, and I want to give people the opportunity to get ahead in life without having to rely on the state, but given the right tools to succeed.  

“I have a different background to an awful lot of my colleagues in that I never went to university.  

“I left college, I worked in a supermarket, worked in a department store and I come at it from a view that I think Conservative policies help people on their way without interfering too much in their lives.  

“But if you need help it should be there for you, and that’s why I hold weekly surgeries in the constituency to make sure that people know what support is out there. 

“I’ve always been a One Nation Conservative who focuses on support that people need and also caring, compassionate conservatism.  

“I’m also, to a point, a libertarian as well because during covid I disagreed with the government on a number of policies relating to vaccine passports and things like mandatory vaccination, because fundamentally the government shouldn’t control what you put in your body.” 

If elected, Mr Jupp says he with focus on local healthcare, housing for local people, sewage spills and more.  “I’ve got a six-point plan,” he said.

“[Firstly] it’s about protecting and improving local healthcare.  

“We’ve seen for example, Ottery Hospital transformed from being half-empty to almost completely full of services, some of which have moved from the RD&E into the community, and I want to see more of that.  

“That includes safeguarding Seaton Hospital. The wing that’s currently empty there needs to be put to good use. Demolishing it would cost two years’ worth of rent. It doesn’t make any sense. 

“Seaton Hospital needs to be held in the same regard as other community hospitals and protected for future generations who pay for it.  

“We know we’ve got, and have done since covid, an increase in second homes and holiday lets.  

“These bring people to the constituency, which is fantastic for tourism, but there isn’t a balance at the moment with the need for local housing for local people.  

“That’s why I talk about quite a lot the idea of when you reach a certain quota of holiday lets or second homes you should be able to then instruct new developments to be as a percentage, say 25 per cent, for local people only in perpetuity.  

“Otherwise, we don’t have people to work in the towns in which we live, and we end up having ghost towns and I don’t want that. I want sustainable communities for the future.  

“And then there’s the environment. We’ve seen a historic lack of investment from South West Water.  

“That tide is changing with £30 million announced for Sidmouth, Tipton St John and Axminster to improve various different schemes in those towns.  

“We pay the highest sewerage bills in the country… and we’ve not had our fair return. South West Water need to up their game and clean up their act. 

“Securing investment, be it private or government investment, is key to growth. We cannot afford to lag behind or be forgotten in our part of Devon. 

“Getting the funding over the line to replace Tipton St John Primary, making sure that Exeter Airport had the support it needed during the pandemic, getting the levelling up funding for Exmouth… have been really big key asks of mine. 

“Another thing that I hear a lot on the doorstep is about local policing. They want visible policing.  

“We know that crime isn’t particularly high in our areas, let’s keep it that way by making sure that police are visible by increasing the number of police enquiry desks. 

“They should have never been closed in the first place and it’s really, really key that we get more of those open, especially in tourism areas like Sidmouth. We’ve got Honiton’s police enquiry desk reopening very soon. 

“People enjoy this area because it’s kept so beautifully. An awful lot of that is down to our farmers who do an amazing job of being the custodians of our countryside.  

“And they want to produce food, not fill out just endless forms all the time.  

“I hold regular farmers’ forums and stand up for our farmers in Parliament, I have held debates and pushed the DEFRA department in the right direction, focusing on our food resilience, our national food security. 

“Covid showed us that buy local, support local was the way forward. I want that to continue.” 

A general election must be called by the prime minister at some point this year.