LGA: Frontloading cuts will lead to job losses

Monday, 13 December 2010 12:00 AM

Cllr Richard Kemp, vice-chairman of the Local Government Association (LGA), comments ahead of the Eric Pickles announcement of central government grants to councils for the next two years:

"Councils are determined to give taxpayers the best possible value for money. With front loaded cuts, councils need to make rapid workforce reductions. Often, the money to fund these one-off reductions can only be found from capital resources.

"On one hand the government is urging councils to dip into their financial reserves to protect services while on the other hand it is preventing them from spending their own money.

"Local residents and council taxpayers will not consider that locking up these resources in the bureaucracy of central government's accounting rules is a sensible use of their money. Councils should be given more flexibility over their capital resources to pay for redundancy costs as they need to.

"The severe and unexpected front loading of the cuts limits the scope of councils to reduce their spending through more innovative measures, such as shifting to shared services, renegotiating longer-term service contracts or outsourcing service delivery. Major changes such as these take time and money to implement. Councils need the flexibility of capitalisation to help restructure their services as quickly and efficiently as possible to avoid unnecessary job losses."

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