At the end of April the Welsh Local Government association published a briefing in response to the April 2009
Budget 2009
budget, you can download a copy by following this link WLGA Budget 2009 briefing.
This briefing sets out the potential impact of the budget for the provision of public services in Wales it lays out an extremely bleak picture for public sector expenditure in the next cycle between 2010 and 2014.
The report states that:
- Average real terms growth in current spending is set to reduce from 1.1% in 2009-10 to 0.7% from 2010-11 to 2013-14, while public investment is set to fall by 17.3% a year in real terms over the same period;
- Budget delivers a 0.1% real terms cut in total public spending over the SR2010 period (ie 2011-12 to 2013-14);
- 0.7% projected average real terms annual growth in current (ie revenue) public spending from 2011-12 to 2013-14, compared to 1.1% in 2009-10;
- Public investment (ie capital) to fall to 1.25% of GDP by 2013-14 which means real terms cut of 17.3% a year in that period.
The briefing calls on the public sector in Wales at levels of government to ‘work together quickly to protect citizens and public services in the face of these budget cuts’.
It urges WAG ‘to think carefully about where the burden of the Budget reductions should fall across the public sector in Wales to ensure that essential services are protected’.
How should we respond this financial pressure?
In essence I feel that we have 2 options:
- To pass it on -
* Through commissioned services in terms of reductions of budget based on declining expectation and competition,
* these services pass it on to staff and service users together with a sense of lack of value and respect,
* and these people pass it on as a sense of disappointment and lack of trust about each other and our leaders. - To share it -
* By drawing on valued relationships with providing partners that the problem must be solved cooperatively through innovation and negotiation,
* by being open with service users and their supporters about the financial reality and being open to their priorities for services despite our professional doubts and reservations,
* by being more ambitious for us as citizens and our communities in our shared capacity to respond to our needs given the right support and encouragement.
The first strategy is easy to do…. it has a sense of depressing reality to it.
The second requires a ‘transformational power’, the academic and Action Researcher Bill Torbert suggests that this transformational power can only be exercised under conditions of ‘mutual vulnerability’ ….. which is good because those are the conditions we are in.
The choice is ours.
