Yesterday (Weds 12th September) Somerset County Council’s Cabinet agreed to make huge spending cuts in over 70 areas of work, despite angry protests from unions, opposition councillors and members of the public.

The cuts include: reducing the winter road gritting service from 23 to 16 routes (and not providing grit to any local grit bins), cutting funding for Citizens Advice services by £469,000 this year and next, cutting funding for youth volunteer groups, and the loss of up to 130 jobs (including 70-80 from the GetSet programme, which provides support to vulnerable children and their parents). A proposal to gradually phase in a reduction of funding to Citizens Advice was rejected after no Cabinet member voted for it. Council leader David Fothergill admitted he and his fellow Conservatives feel “abandoned” by the Government, complained that his and Somerset’s MPs’ lobbying had simply not been heard, and there had been “no sympathy coming back from government, and no extra funding. Nothing from government, other than a legal requirement for me to balance the budget.”

All this has been reported by Somerset Live (see the article and video here), BBC news (see here) and Channel 4 (see here).

Somerset County Council’s press release (with links to reports) is here, and a later statement on the financial crisis is here.

Somerset Lib Dems’ statement on this is here – this is recommended reading.

The reasons for this seem to me to be: (1) Government austerity cuts to council funding and their failure to put in place the plans to replace grants by retaining a higher percentage of business rates, (2) a rise in costs of children going into care (which is a failure in itself) and an increase in adult social care costs, but also (3) the six year Council Tax freeze which the Conservatives at Somerset bribed voters with, which left a huge £110 million hole in county finances, which cannot now be filled. See the report on the independent auditors report in July (see here). There is probably worse to come.

So – what to do? Vulnerable people in need in Somerset will be affected. Mendip Citizens Advice will have a 21% cut in funding, which will no doubt affect the amount of advice they can give to people across the district. More roads will not be passable in winter conditions. At a three-tier meeting of all Frome’s town, district and county councillors on Monday 10th Sept, I raised the issue of the cuts and what Frome Town Council and Mendip could do about this. We agreed that another meeting will be called to go through the detail when we know more. At Mendip I have proposed a motion to look into what MDC can do, including to support Citizens Advice funding (see here) so we can debate the impacts and ways to mitigate the impacts.  But fundamentally the County finances are in a mess, and Somerset County Council is still at risk of going bankrupt next year.

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