Cuts diary: observations on the public spending squeeze

The first in an occasional series of posts where I round up stories, reports, trends, and gossip about cuts and their consequences • Is the simmering resentment felt by many councils towards the communities secretary Eric Pickles reaching boiling point? A fascinating report (subscription only) of Pickles' speech to a London councils conference of at the weekend by Allister Hayman of Local Government Chronicle (LGC) describes the minister as "rattled" and "angry" after councillors heckled him over the government's housing benefit reforms. Here's a selection of Hayman's tweets on Saturday afternoon: "@ericpickles speaking at London Councils summit- heckled over cuts & housing benefit- looking harried in speech... Stumbling" "Hostile audience at London Councils to @ericpickles - Pickles getting rather angry - feels like a hustings not an S[ecretary]o[f] S[tate] speech..." "London Cllrs say #localgov cuts frontloaded - 15-20% next yr- not 7.2% as ministers claim- @ericpickles says this is 'a fiction'..." "...Never seen a SoS quite as rattled as @ericpickles at #LCsummit - his localism schtick not washing with Lab cllrs" Interestingly, according to the LGC piece Pickles: "...also claimed that he had received Freedom of Information requests back from every London borough which showed that "not a single borough" had begun block-booking accommodation for residents made homeless due to the cuts to housing benefit as had been claimed in media reports." This contradicts Haringey council's claim for instance, that other councils were "buying up leases in the borough" in anticipation of the changes. True or not, it begs the question: is it normal - or cost effective - for government departments to have to FOI the councils they are nominally responsible for? • "Frontloading" meanwhile, may become more a commonly known technical term as the political row about cuts unfolds. Essentially it describes why a council may have to cut its budget swiftly, piling the pain into the first year of the spending review period, rather than, as ministers would prefer, spreading the burden equally over four years. I explained in an earlier cuts blog post why Labour-controlled Blackburn with Darwen council says it has to "frontload" the cuts and why ministers are so wary of it. Communities secretary Eric Pickles (see above) appears to believe it is "a fiction" that councils have to frontload the cuts. But it is not just Labour councils doing it: Tory-run Warwickshire county council, which faces £60m cuts with the prospect of up to 1,800 jobs being lost, has decided to pack its savings programme into three years , rather than four. • More evidence that the cuts are, for some places, coming faster and deeper than expected : Stoke City council, which was planning to take £25m out of its 2010-11 budget, but now faces having to make £33m cuts. Around 700 jobs will go, as well as services from libraries to teenage pregnancy schemes , according to proposals published by the council. This year will also be the last in which the council will fund town and city centre Christmas lights. • A grim message from Mary Cunningham of the National Youth Council of Ireland to last week's National Council for Voluntary Youth Services annual conference . Youth services may be badly hit by the cuts in the UK, but "compared to [ Ireland] you haven't seen anything, " she told delegates the meeting, held in King's Place, London (home of the Guardian) last week. Ireland has a small youth services charity sector (1,000 professional youth workers), which has only relatively recently received much in the way of state funding. That, however, it about to all but disappear as the country prepares to undergo another round of austerity measures. Already a fifth of youth services charities have seen income reduced by between 11 and 20%. The sector has witnessed job freezes, pay cuts, and axing of back office functions. Worse is to come after next month's budget, however. Said Cunningham: "Every [charity] still standing at the start of 2010 is still standing. But after the December cuts a number of organisations will be on the brink. Informally, there will be fewer [youth charities] standing at the end of 2010" • Probably the best analysis of big society I've yet read comes from Anna Coote, whose paper Cutting it, was published last Thursday . Here's a quote from Coote which neatly sums up the thrust of the report: "The cuts mean there is a much heavier responsibility for dealing with more acute poverty, unemployment, distress and social conflict. It is madness to imagine that in these conditions civil society can fill the gaps left by a retreating state." I spoke at the report's launch at the Royal Society of Arts, along with Coote, Jonty Olliffe-Cooper of Demos, and the BBC's Mark Easton. You can get a flavour of what was said and thought from this Twitter stream , or listen to the audio of the whole debate here .