English: Eric Pickles, British politician and Chairman of the Conservative Party, at the Health Hotel “Health Zone” at the Manchester Central Conference Centre during the Conservative Party Conference 2009. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Recently, I reblogged a powerful article in the Guardian entitled: Dozens of local councils close to collapse, says MPs’ committee | Society | The Guardian. I received a robust response from John Gelmini which I am reblogging below.

Personally, I fully endorse John’s viewpoint here. Indeed, when I first started blogging I wrote a detailed blog about the inner workings of Local Authority decision-making. The blog entitled: UK Local Authorities and Shared Services: Cost Cutting – Myths,Realities and Escalating Risks? has been one of my most popular blogs with a large number of hits. Interestingly, I also received a detailed response from John Gelmini at that time which I reblogged entitled: UK Local Authorities and Shared Services: Cost-Cutting – Myths, Realities and Escalating Risks? Response – Addressing the Social and Political Context with Radical Reform/ Transformation.

Anyway, returning to the current thread, here is John’s latest viewpoint:

A Hard Look at Why Dozens of Local Authorities are Collapsing in the UK – John Gelmini

Without the ability of clairvoyance, I have been predicting this since 2010.

There are simply too many local authorities, just twelve county unitary authorities are needed for England, not forty-three and Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland need one each.

Districts and Boroughs should have been abolished years ago and their functions outsourced to reputable providers.

I was rubbished for saying this by a number of LinkedIn posters and accused of ranting, so now the chickens have really come home to roost with a vengeance.

Adult Social Care costs are now running at 50% of County Council budgets and with the 1.25 million woman aged 65 plus with early stage dementia that figure is rising at the same time as Local Authority Minister Eric Pickles and Chancellor Osborne are squeezing Standard Spending Assessments and just before the Romanians and Bulgarians arrive.

I predict now that a number of Local Authority care homes will close and councils will, like Pontius Pilate, wash their hands of them by sending them home for relatives to look after them. Some of these care home recipients will die and private care home operators already squeezed by Local Authorities will get rid of benefit recipients who cannot make up the shortfall or whose relatives refuse to do so.

People who think it is someone else’s job to care for these people are in for a very rude awakening and not before time.

The luxury of separate call centers for general enquiries, Adult Social Care, the Police and Fire Commands will have to give way to large Shared Service Centers (CSC) of the type for which I drew up blueprints in 2008/2009; finance functions and a lot of administration can be outsourced to India; and the number of council CEOs reduced to just 12.

Junketing by council officials, misusing RIPA to investigate dog fouling, holding up planning consent for legitimate and necessary business expansion, imposing car parking charges which destroy local businesses, spying to see where someone lives for the purposes of establishing what school catchment area they live in, appointing relatives and mistresses to key posts, engaging in skullduggery on the golf course and making key and often wrong decisions in secret are all activities that need to be brought to an end if this impending train wreck is to be mitigated.

There will be trouble because people are not going to pay hundreds of pounds every month for non-existent services or greatly reduced ones.

As predicted, we have entered a long, hot Summer; with most of the political classes now on holiday, let’s hope that it will not remembered  be remembered as the UK Summer of discontent.

Any thoughts?

John Gelmini

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