Lest we forget.

As a councillor I get invited to attend many events during the course of the year, and whilst there is never enough time to put in an appearance at all of them, the Remembrance Sunday service at the Cenotaph is one that I feel extremely privileged to attend. I always find it very poignant and moving and I feel greatly honoured to be able to lay the wreath on behalf of the District Council as I have for the past 7 years.

The Remembrance Sunday commemorations that occur all across the country every year give us all the chance to lay aside our differences for a few moments and to concentrate on, and give thanks to all of those who gave their lives to ensure that we have the freedom to have those differences. Most of my generation have been lucky enough to grow up in safety for the most part, without the threat of having to go to war and having to make the ultimate sacrifice, the younger generation have certainly stepped up to the mark in the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts and we will have the opportunity to salute those that have served there as well.

The fallout from the Comprehensive Spending Review continues to reverberate around local government, Somerset County Council have given more details as to how the savings that are required will have to be made, and without doubt, most people will notice these changes as they come through.  I don’t think that there are many politicians that put themselves forward for election with the sole purpose of slashing public spending, however I do think that spending got seriously out of control thanks to the last Labour Government nationally and the Lib Dem administration at County Hall locally. The levels of expenditure and debt that occurred during that period of profligacy have now come home to roost, and it is essential that it be reined in.

What has not been widely publicised, especially by the Labour luvvies in the BBC who seem to glory in their doom and gloom headlines, is that overall there will be no actual cash terms cut in spending during the five year term of this government, all of the changes merely mean that the proposed growth in public spending will not occur as previously planned and at the end of the parliament the rate of public spending will be the equivalent that we last saw in 2007, so hardly a return to the dark ages that the prophets of doom glory in.

While Somerset County Council has its unique problems, especially its massive £400 million Lib Dem debt to service, other local councils have also announced that cuts will have to be made, Gloucester have announced that over 1000 jobs will be lost, Wiltshire who initially forecast that because they are a unitary they would be insulated from the cuts have said that they mis-calculated the scale of the problem by about £50 million and will have to re-think, the new unitary in Cornwall is having major problems even getting an agreement on what is to be done and so it goes on.

Closer to home, Mendip’s Cabinet had a briefing on Monday evening as to what we know about the levels of savings that we will have to make. The headline figure looks as though it will be somewhere around £2 million over 4 years (7.1% pa) but we will not know exactly how that pans out until early December when we should get more precise figures. My portfolio deals with the payment of benefits and collection of taxes and we will see big changes as the plans to move to a single universal credit from the current myriad of benefits feed through. Ian Duncan Smith has put an awful lot of work and his reputation into sorting out the benefits system, and so far the plans seem to have attracted cross party support. It can only be right to for someone who works to be better off than someone who is relying on benefits, it is how you get from one to the other that will be the test. It will also be vital that the private sector grows strongly over the next 5 years to create the jobs that people who come off of benefits will need.

Possibly the most interesting point that has come to light in the last few weeks regards the scheme to re-evaluate everyone who has been claiming Incapacity Benefit over the last few years. The new process evaluates what people are able to do and does not concentrate on the things that they are unable to do. As a result, thousands of former claimants have been found to be fit for work, including some who claimed that they were too fat!!!, and thousands of others have volunteered to come off of the benefit rather than go through the test.

Perhaps after all, the shock of the country’s financial predicament could lead to some fundamental changes to our welfare state that have been long overdue?