Help Needed (Desperately) To Shape The Harrow Of The Future

Harrow Council’s eight week Take Part consultation on the first round of proposed cuts started, ran and ended without any specific information about the proposed cuts.

As a vehicle for reasoned consideration, the Take Part Budget Consultation Questionnaire was a travesty. It listed options that are likely to be divisive, offered them in a confusing negative form, and asked them twice, as if respondents would volunteer that the community is likely to be of a different opinion to themselves.

The perversely constructed questionnaire is likely to have defeated any sensible respondent for other reasons too. There was no information available about the various options. We have no idea what the cost of the individual services are, what the scale of each of the proposed cuts is, how much saving each will create (if any), or what the trade-offs would be. In most cases it’s “reduce” “close some” or “cut some”.

How much? How many? Which ones? How could anybody say how much impact it would have without knowing the answers to these fundamental questions?

Council has a duty to ensure that any cuts to services are made fairly and equitably, and for this they need to be considered in the round.

It is pretty obvious that a number of the proposed cuts will only effect those that use those services, starting with the proposed closure of the Emergency Relief  Scheme, a service provided only to the most desperate and one hopefully not needed by most residents. Does this mean that because most respondents will therefore not answer that closure of the scheme would impact on their family, that they would be happy for Council to close the scheme to families in dire need? 

On the other hand, cutting the number of senior managers is unlikely to be an option selected as having the most impact on respondents either, but (a) they wouldn’t know, and (b) the Council is increasing the number anyway with its recent high profile appointment. In any case, it’s not about numbers. It’s about effectiveness. The question is really, are they doing their job well? Based on these proposals and this questionnaire they patently are not.

Council department heads have been working on generating the ideas for these proposed cuts since early this year, and this is as far as they have gotten. There was no further information available to respondents to the questionnaire because there is no such information. None of these ideas have been outlined, never mind detailed. They are just off-the-cuff suggestions.

There are no costings, no projected savings, no methodologies, no time scales, for any of the “proposed cuts”. These will be worked out, sources tell us, once Cabinet has made a decision about which ones to pursue. Based on what? Based on the information that will be worked up once the decision has been made. One can sense the presence of genius.

We don’t even know how much money this first round of proposed cuts is supposed to save. In the absence of a target, we will never know if it has been met. If we assume that a figure of £20 million would not be too wrong (£75 million has to found over 4 years), some radical thinking, not evident in these proposals, is likely to be needed.

How much does Council hold as its capital reserve, and should this be the time to consider drawing it down?  At this time of historically low interest rates, should Council not be securing borrowing at fixed rates to provide funding for income-generating projects that would increase its revenue streams in coming years?

The second question of the budget consultation survey is revealing. “How much, if at all, do you now feel that you personally know about why the Council is proposing to make cuts of £75 million in the next 4 years?”. The answer of course is nothing, as is anticipated in the question. The question, however, should have been how much do you now know about the cuts proposed in this questionnaire?  Lamentably, the answer would again be nothing.

Instead of running costly and pointless consultations like the Take Part cuts questionnaire, with its questions posed in an information vacuum, Council should be mounting a campaign and a legal challenge to get the funding formula reviewed and for Harrow to get a more appropriate settlement from central Government.

Could do better.

Some service requirements will have changed over the years and imbalances of provisioning should have been regularly adjusted as a normal part of progress. Proper analysis of how services are used requires a little more effort from departmental heads than the generation of a few vague ideas at a time of crisis. A proper impact study provides a proper basis for decision making. Anything less is cavalier and irresponsible.

Out of continuous revision comes the confident knowledge that services are meeting needs and delivery is matching requirements. Instead, what we are presented with in the Take Part project is the sight of a floundering Council, desperate for ideas, having left its decisions far to late to give them due consideration, and which will inevitably make knee-jerk responses that could lead to catastrophic mistakes that save little or no money. 

What’s needed is proper, balanced, fact led analysis, and a sensible unhurried debate. Not a fatuous and flimsy charade of a public consultation which can only be ignored because it cannot produce anything of use.

The survey ended on November 8^th and a summary of responses will be presented to cabinet on 11^th December. Details will then be produced to explain the decisions Council proposes to go ahead with, ostensibly, to enable further consultations to take place.

This new information will need to be considered by taxpayers at a time when their thoughts are likely to be focused on Christmas and little else. It should have been being scrutinised over the months of spring, summer and autumn, but Council officers failed to produce it. Instead, it is proposed that this vital and weighty decision making will all be squeezed into the last days of December, and the dark days of January.

Council has to make its decisions for the budget by February 2015. It will be the last minute rushed result that has been a year in the planning.

It’s not too late to start behaving responsibly and rationally, although that may mean putting off some of these proposed cuts until they can be properly justified and weighed in the balance.

Done properly, this could be an opportunity to refine and improve services, instead of a slash and burn exercise.