Tough Times in Local Government

I love the language used in Audit Scotland reports: careful, understated accountant speak, a marked contrast to the often heated excitement of blogs and social media. This report is no exception: “performance and challenges” doesn’t sound scary but if you rely on local services, if your children are in school or if you work there the information in the report is very scary indeed.
Audit Scotland highlight a number of different “challenges:”

New policies and legislation mean big changes in the way things have to be done and a growing number of over 75s is driving demand for care services. All this must be achieved not with new funding to meet demand, to smooth transition but a cut of over 9% revenue funding since 2011.

Don’t worry there are plenty of people there to share the workload....

Sorry my mistake a lot less people...

To be fair some of these people work in ALEOs but we won’t know how many until Audit Scotland report back later in the year. Over a decade of ALEOs with no real national scrutiny.

But here’s a final image feel free to share it when people try to tell you there haven’t been cuts in local government budgets.

The full Audit Scotland report is available here