Earlier this week, Dundee City Council launched its annual attempt to make everyone complicit in its implementation of cuts to services. “It wasn’t us! This is what the public chose!” will be the call as they settle the budget on the backs of Dundee Citizens in the new year. They call it participatory democracy but in reality, it is the equivalent of the gunslinger telling the Mexican peasant to “Pick up the gun!”.
Let’s look at this process. The council officers produce a list of things that they believe could be cut and asks the public to vote on them. Councillors are then equipped with a pecking order of what cuts they can perhaps get away with, with the least public outcry (loss of votes).
In terms of the public having their say, you have to ask why things the public rejected last year, appear again on the list this year, now with even more unpalatable alternative options.
Councillors bemoan the fact that they are blamed for these, year on year cuts, when they accurately explain this is down to a staggering long-term deficit between the funding from Scottish and UK governments and the increasing cost and demand pressures.
CoSLA reports that there is a funding shortfall of £647m in 2025/26, with a further £528m shortfall in 26/27 and £496m in 27/28. The overall council funding deficit has been over £5billion across Scottish councils since 2011, with Dundee City reporting over £180m cut from its funding over a similar period.
If all councillors do, however, is rubber stamp the imposition of those cuts, what is their point? You might as well let the officers make the decisions in conjunction with ministers.
Unions were briefed at the last minute on this year’s proposals and were told that these were options that minimised the impact on jobs (but not entirely and certainly not if you count the jobs that will be lost in external organisations that will see their funding removed).
In addition, we all know that around half the annual cuts are already made by the officers, through redundancies and reviews of services throughout the year (including hidden redundancies by deletion of masses of vacant posts, euphemistically called “tidying up exercises”). Much of this is waved through by councillors in reports that don’t get much public attention.
All services are at breaking point. So much working experience has been lost, and staffing levels are way below what is sustainable. Hardly surprising then, that staff are burned out and absence due to Stress and Anxiety related conditions is through the roof and face growing violence and aggression – partly from understaffing in school, early years and some care settings but also due to the huge frustration among the public about the decline in service quality/delivery.
Until the fundamental issue of reversing the decades long cuts to public funding is addressed, achievable by spending less on wars, stopping the profit grab of public money by corporations and taxing the rich properly, we will be stuck with this damaging cycle of decline.
All the governing parties carry some responsibility for this, but opportunist like Reform UK, offer no alternatives and even promise more cuts. They like to pretend public services are full of inefficiency and waste, where the reality is they have been brought to breaking point by decades of cuts.
Where there is waste is primarily where public sector decision makers have been duped into allowing private sector profiteers to get involved in service provision. No sooner are they established as the only option, than they start to wrack up charges and squeeze massive profits from the public purse.
We need to fight to restore the balance of tax and spend that we knew in the 1970s, when access to affordable or free genuinely public services was on everyone’s doorstep.