Rural communities and government budget
Posted by Kerry Smith on July 02 2010 11:31:51
RURAL communities face being among those worst hit by public sector cuts included in the government’s Budget.
Extended News
RURAL communities face being among those worst hit by public sector cuts included in the government’s Budget.
Oxfordshire has most public sector workers.
People in the countryside are more likely to have a job in the public sector, according to a league table compiled by economic consultants Rose Regeneration.
One in three jobs in predominantly rural local authority areas are within the public sector, it found. This compares to one in four jobs in other local authority areas.
“The economy is clearly emerging from recession but there is a price to pay – massive reductions in public sector expenditure,” said Rose director Ivan Annibal.
The government unveiled a 25% reduction in cash funding for all departments except health and overseas aid on Tuesday (22 June).
The emergency Budget reduction is on top of a freeze in pay and benefits for public sector workers.
This is bad news for rural communities, Mr Annibal warned. “Rural England is more dependent on the public sector than urban England,” he explained. “This means any public sector job losses and spending cuts threaten to have a bigger impact on the most rural parts of the country.
“Careful thinking is needed to avoid unintended consequences when implementing cuts which could impact significantly on rural communities.”
David Cameron’s home county of Oxfordshire has more public sector employees than some major cities, reveals the Rose Regeneration analysis. With 96,000 public sector workers, the Prime Minister’s county has a bigger public sector than Manchester (90,000 employees) or Liverpool (89,000).
The full analysis can be downloaded here (324KB pdf).
It shows that almost one in three jobs (30%) in rural counties like Oxfordshire are within the public sector. Other counties with a high public sector job count include Norfolk, Devon, Cambridgeshire, Lincolnshire, Suffolk, Somerset and North Yorkshire. Close behind are Cornwall, County Durham, Cumbria, Wiltshire, Dorset, Yorkshire (East Riding), Northumberland, Shropshire and Herefordshire.
Other analysts agree that public sector job cuts are now all but inevitable following the emergency Budget.
"The state cannot need as many people to spend 25% less money,” said Rob Hindle of regeneration specialists Rural Innovation. "It will also have to find new ways of delivering services – doing more for less,” he added. The way some services were delivered would have to change, Mr Hindle suggested in a Budget analysis posted on his weblog.
“We are likely to lose some service outlets such as small village schools, libraries and perhaps depots and offices.” Discretionary spending and access to time-limited “programme” funding was likely to be extensively curtailed, said Mr Hindle.
This would reduce the need for the related project officers and administrator posts which had become standard across many public sector organisations. "There will inevitably be some economic displacement and it seems probable that an element of spending will be lost to some small rural economies for good.”