MC Feature: Britain after 14 years of Tory rule
The nation’s public realm was starved. This is what happened next.
Good morning. Here is this week’s Morning Call Feature. It is our cover this week, by Anoosh Chakelian. As we said in the Saturday Read yesterday, Anoosh has written the definitive piece on perhaps the storyline of the past 14 years: the collapse of local government. Her reporting stitches together, over 2,600 words, threads of fact and observation into a powerful polemic. The first 800 words run below.
Subscribers to the Morning Call paid tier can read the piece in full in-email, along with the recommended piece we send each week day. You will also receive Mailshot, Ben’s take, and the sign-off each day, and future interviews of note that we do. Join us: a year’s subscription is £3 a month using the button below. (NS subscribers can read Anoosh’s piece, and all our paid tier articles, on our website.)
One recent misty morning in Taunton, the county town of Somerset, I was taken on a tour of our decaying public realm. The flowerbeds, which have won Britain in Bloom contests, will no longer be planted along the neat Victorian promenades of Vivary Park. Funding for the Brewhouse, a modernist theatre of Bourbon-biscuit-coloured brick decorated with a Shakespeare mural, is ending. At a popular café, a server with Down’s syndrome will lose the employment service that supports the job he loves. The local swimming pool was shut to make way for riverside flats and shops – where some units have sat empty for two years. A Georgian market house, home to the local radio station and tourist information centre, is “vulnerable”. A bus subsidised by the council, bearing its rusting white livery, will no longer run. Even the public toilets will close.
These were just a handful of entries on a “heartbreaking” 200-line spreadsheet the Somerset Council leader, Bill Revans, was toiling over when I visited (councils finalised their budgets in February). A burly retired history teacher and proud Somerset boy born in Taunton, Revans, who is 55, looked bereft. With his russet beard, crinkly-eyed smile and sorrowful baritone chuckle, he seemed like a reverse Father Christmas: he was taking things away, door by door.
Walking me through town, he mentioned defunding beach lifeguard coverage, school crossing patrols and recycling centres. Through a portcullis archway we reached a 12th-century castle, home to the Museum of Somerset. The yellow county flag emblazoned with a red dragon was fluttering from its roof. Even council finance for this museum was running out. “Imagine for a history teacher the prospect of cutting heritage,” Revans said.
While he was still trying to find temporary solutions and delays to some of these cuts when we met, Revans knew he was buying time. “This year, the choices are painful. Next year, they’ll be painful again, and the year after and the year after – until ultimately, the system will collapse.”
A market town redolent of old England, with its cobbled streets, Norman battlements and wrought iron gates bearing the coat of arms (“Defendamus Borough of Taunton”), had become a symbol of the new England too. Defendamus Boarded-up Debenhams.
Somerset Council – run by Conservatives from 2009 to 2022, and the Liberal Democrats for the past two years – had to find £100m of savings, £35m of which would come from cuts. Last year, it declared a “financial emergency” and is close to filing a “Section 114” notice: the local government version of bankruptcy.
Councils have a statutory duty to provide certain core services, including social care (residential and community care for the elderly, chronically ill and disabled), but can drop so-called discretionary services. These can be as fundamental to everyday life as pest control, sports facilities and youth clubs.
Somerset is part of a wider trend. Eight councils have gone bankrupt since 2010, when the Conservative–Lib Dem coalition began its austerity programme that sliced heavily into local government. These include major city councils such as Nottingham and Birmingham – the biggest council in Europe, which has voted to make savings by raising council tax by 21 per cent over the next two years, cutting 600 jobs, and even by dimming streetlights.
Northamptonshire, Croydon, Slough, Northumberland, Thurrock and Woking have also gone under. Twenty more councils are at immediate risk. (The New Statesman’s Spotlight policy section regularly updates an online map of councils in financial peril.)
It’s not just happening in England: nearly a quarter of Scottish councils fear they can’t balance their budgets this year, and Welsh council leaders have also warned about the likelihood of bankruptcies. Crisis-ravaged councils span party colours and a range of different failings – including risky commercial ventures, financial mismanagement and bungled local projects.
In Birmingham, England’s second city, an equal-pay claim left to fester is costing the council £1.15bn. In Croydon, south London, the council set up its own housing developer – a company that collapsed and left 41 housing schemes behind that either had to be cancelled or sold on. Woking in Surrey ran up £2bn of debt on a property investment spree in hotels and high-rise flats. And Nottingham’s attempt at establishing its own energy company, the council-run Robin Hood Energy, failed because of problems with purchasing gas. In Thurrock, the Essex port town where the Tory-led borough council went bust in 2022, the council made wild bets on commercial schemes, including sinking tens of millions into solar farms as far as away as Wiltshire. Such decisions left the town without a return on its money but the private investors tasked with spending it very well-off.
On a recent trip to Thurrock, I found a town reduced to its bones.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Morning Call to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.