IT'S OUT OF THE BAG

Lord Rennard has been talking about the local government cuts and he has let the cat out of the bag, he says;

“There’s a clear problem here, and at the very least, it’s to do with phasing. By making the economies very quickly, a number of local authorities will feel that they have to cope with almost all the redundancy costs which they face in the short-term, rather than being able to capitalise them over a much longer term. And they have their statutory obligations, clearly they feel more pressured to cut from voluntary sector support than they do from some of their core services.

Now some people will argue that we need to try and change the way in which local authorities prioritise so they don’t cut back on the voluntary sector disproportionately. But the best way, in my view, that government nationally could help local authorities in that direction would be to allow for things like more generous capitalisation of redundancies and for the more generous phasing of economies, recognising that economies must be made. If the economies have to be made at a very rapid rate, then it gets very hard to do this.

A number of local authorities would argue very sensibly, that if they had a bit more time, they could work with the voluntary sector, to make sure that some of these key services which nobody wants to lose are actually saved and preserved by the voluntary sector, helped by voluntary sector involvement in the long-run. But if these economies are made too quickly, that simply can’t happen, and there is a danger that things are lost that can’t then be replaced. A very clear danger of that.”

So leaders of both the Conservatives and Lib Dems have it, they've cut too hard and too fast, this is a leading Lib Dems lords view, will their local candidates see it that way?