3 lessons from passing my first £165m council budget
Tonight, Harrow Council passed a £165m budget, the first I presented as Cabinet member for Finance.
It was an incredibly difficult process, an uphill struggle against swingeing central government funding cuts and sky-rocketing demand for our social care and homelessness services.
While the red blood cells are still pumping, here’s three things I learnt from it over the past year.
1. The work doesn’t start until the “work” is done
The first stage of budget-setting usually involves understanding the financial context and developing the best possible set of options that get you to where you need to be.
That can feel pretty intensive. Any sizeable budget — never mind a public one — is riddled with detail and complexity that take time to unpick. Beyond that, there is the challenge of getting departments to cough up all available options, not just the ones they want you to see. That’s especially hard in the eighth year of cuts.
But all that is just the beginning. Budgets set priorities. They impose hard constraints on what can and can’t be done the rest of the year that are tough to wriggle out of once fixed in place.
That means the stakes are high. And that means people really, really care — as they should.
Involving the right people at the right time and building a sufficient consensus — among politicians, council officers, our external partners in the public, private, and voluntary sectors, and of course with the voters at large — is the real meat of the puzzle.
What looks like a pile of numbers at the end is the toothpaste that comes out of a very long and windy tube.
2. No one has the whole answer — but everyone has some of it
Many times during the process, you hope — pray — that someone has the answer and they’re just not telling you.
Maybe your finance officers have something up their sleeve. Maybe the Chief Executive will tap you on the shoulder and give you a hint. Perhaps a wizened alderman will know what to do.
The sad truth is that we all struggle in the dark to make the trade-offs work as best as we possibly can.
But while no one can tell you what to do, everyone has something to add. The finance team — and here I name check the utterly excellent Dawn Calvert and Sharon Daniels in Harrow — are your guides, keeping you on the straight and narrow.
Your fellow councillors are your moral compass (I would say even more so in the Labour Party), making sure you don’t end up cutting in areas where the people affected have the least power to fight back.
And your constituents are your ultimate test. They’ll tell you sharpish if you’ve forgotten to fix the basics while you conjure up cunning plans to redesign services and invest in brilliant new ventures.
One councillor came to me late in the process to share concerns about a cut to a service she had personal experience with. Her honest and authentic appeal made me realise it wasn’t the “straightforward” saving I had expected — so we found another, better way.
Don’t listen to someone. Listen to everyone.
3. The vote to pass a budget starts the race to the next one
The whisky is poured (ok, ginger tea… it is Thursday after all). The adrenalin is running dry. It’s time for a good night sleep.
Actually, no. It’s time to start working on the next budget.
For the budget just passed, we started plotting process and broad outlines about nine months before year end. That felt a bit of a hurry.
This year, with a rushing wave of demand on our services hitting a gaping hole of lost funding, we will need to start right away.
That’s how we’re going to find out, like the bank robber Willie Sutton, “where the money is”. That’s how we’re going to get serious options on the table. And that’s how we’re going to involve as many people as possible as early as possible.
The starting gun is fired. And I’m off to bed.
