A local authority finance worker says the cuts are hurting – but they’re still not prompting the big reforms required
“I work as an accountant in the internal audit team of a rural area county council, after joining the authority on a finance graduate scheme. In recent years, my council has – like all local authorities – been hit badly by central government funding reductions. This has had implications for most aspects of how the council is run.
One way in which staff have felt the cuts has been the complete abolition of staff subsistence funding – sandwiches during meetings or business trips. Generally, we are encouraged to travel as little as possible, hold virtual meetings, and work from home to enable the council to save on rent. There has also been a continuous reduction in head count, less by way of redundancies than by simply not filling vacancies when they arise. My team used to be made up of 12 people; now there are six of us.
Meanwhile, our council has dealt with shrinking budgets by buying into shared services arrangements. We created a shared services centre a few years ago, run by staff from our council in conjunction with a number of neighbouring authorities. It makes sense to share back-office functions such as pensions, legal services and accounting, as previously there had been a lot of duplication. It’s useful to share out the cost of employing specialists, too: they’re expensive, and single authorities may not have enough work to keep them busy.
Merging these services, however, comes with a range of managerial challenges. For starters, even though we in the finance department are meant to be part of this new shared service, we’re not co-located with colleagues funded by other councils. So we are still working from different bases, with managers floating between offices. This means it is very hard to instil a sense of identity or any kind of team spirit, which dampens morale. There is also a great sense of uncertainty, because no one is sure if there will be more cuts or redundancies.
Another factor negatively affecting morale is the variation between shared service employees’ pay: it very much depends on which authority they’re funded by. Often a person employed by one of the authorities in our shared services centre, doing exactly the same job as someone from another authority, is paid significantly less; this can lead to resentment and personal tensions.
There is a sense that, after several years of funding cuts to local government, our council is at its wit’s end when it comes to finding more savings – a task that seems inevitable, as there is still no end to funding cuts in sight. Among the measures our authority has considered recently has been the reduction of staff sick pay. This plan met with strong opposition from workers and the unions, and has since been retracted. The very fact that it was suggested, though, does a great deal to freak people out.
Another proposal – which I believe has been approved – is an agreement that, should the council find itself in extremely challenging financial circumstances, staff will be asked to take one or two days of unpaid leave.
I understand these steps are useful, because we’re facing difficult times across the country. But I don’t think this council has fully explored other ways in which it could achieve significant savings. So far, the problem is that no matter how hard the authority tries to get its officers to re-think how they deliver services in order to cut costs, ultimately managers don’t implement the kind of sweeping changes that might completely revolutionise services. After all, such changes might well lead to their own jobs and those of their close colleagues being deleted.
It’s not even that such big reforms would be wildly unpopular – it’s just that people are naturally not going to propose new structures or ways of delivering services that don’t include them. It’s not a problem that I can see has any particular solution, because it’s just human nature; but going on as we are inevitably leads to the current “salami-slicing” method of making savings.
I think that central government does need to keep up the pressure to get local authorities to conduct major re-thinks of their structures and services. That’s where central government does have an important role to play in identifying best practice and leading change.”