Whether through prescience or wild optimism, Lord Porter claims to have foreseen the result of this year’s general election. He even put money on a Tory victory at the bookies. “I should have put all my council budget on it,” he laughs ruefully. “That would have sorted us for the spending review.”

Alas, there is no prospect of a sudden windfall, either for South Holland, the Lincolnshire district he leads, or any other council. Town halls are staring into the financial abyss. After five years of shrinking budgets, Wednesday’s government spending review is expected to pile billions more cuts on to local authorities over the next half decade, a prospect that the Local Government Association (LGA) has warned will deliver a “knockout blow to cherished local services”.

Ironically, it has fallen to Porter, an unabashed Conservative enthusiast for radically shrinking the state, to make the case to his ideological soulmate, the chancellor George Osborne, that the cuts have gone as far as they can go. Porter, elected to chair the LGA in the summer, has up to now zealously embraced council austerity, eagerly axing what he calls the municipal “nonsense” that “added value to nobody’s life”. But no longer.

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“There is a limit to how much of that stuff you can do. At some point you are going to have to start doing service changes and that is going to end up giving people a lower quality of service at the same time as their [council tax] bill is going up. There isn’t really a business model that says that’s a good idea. No one ever liked to pay more for getting less.”

Anyone lucky enough to have been oblivious to local authority cuts in recent years will start to notice, says Porter. Services that many take for granted will be shredded further, such as leisure centres, parks, and museums, along with statutory services such as libraries, street cleaning, and local bus services for elderly and disabled people. Affluent residents will notice the unfixed potholes in the road, and that grass verges lie uncut for weeks.

Unkempt verges hardly capture the massive scale of the likely cuts, however. Local authorities are anticipating reductions of between 25% and 40%. At the upper end, that would strip over £10bn from central government funding for councils. Then there’s another £10bn in additional costs between now and 2020 as a direct result of other government policies such as the introduction of the National Living Wage, and the 1% cut in social housing rents.

It will be impossible to hide the impact on core services, Porter suggests. You could close every children’s centre in England, he argues, and save £700m. But that sum would only plug the funding gap facing adult social care for a year. Some councils are on the edge of collapse. “We are not going to see hundreds of councils falling over in the next year or two. But we are close to a dozen nationally, which will, if the spending review goes the way we think it will, be right on the edge and ready to go.”

Was Porter shocked by the recent leak of letters that showed the prime minister David Cameron surprised by the scale of cuts to his own county council, Oxfordshire, (and having to be humiliatingly lectured on the reality by the council’s Tory leader). Porter, unconvincingly, suggests the PM’s response was that of many ordinary citizens, who are unaware of shrinking budgets because of council efficiency. “He was Dave from Chipping Norton, an MP, writing to the leader of his council … in that context, he’s not the prime minister, he’s just a member of the public.”

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Porter is revered by some on the right for running one of the tiny handful of authorities to cut council tax in each of the last four years. Next year’s proposed budget for South Holland, however, suggests a 1.95% council tax increase to mitigate the scale of local cuts. For a small-state, low-tax Tory like Porter, you sense that small potential tax rise symbolises precisely how the austerity project has run out of road.

Similarly, South Holland is esteemed by some for its dogged, Eric Pickles-esque retention of weekly bin collections. Would the cuts threaten that policy? Porter says he would resign rather than shift to a fortnightly refuse service. “I couldn’t do that: I’d be thinking ‘What is the point of me? … Personally, I believe you have to do things [as a council] like put a roof over people’s heads and empty the dustbins [each week].”

Perhaps surprisingly, Porter is exercised by several key government policies. He supports housing association right to buy, but not the proposal to fund that giveaway by selling off high-value council properties,. Let councils keep the money to build their own homes, he says. He is not wild about the proposed cuts to working tax credits (“I don’t agree with the detail”). He opposes the protection of NHS funding at the expense of local government(“It’s going to get me into trouble, but I don’t care, they can send death threats again. We shouldn’t ringfence national health budgets”).

Instead, he calls for £3bn of NHS cash to be immediately diverted to local authorities to spend on adult social care in ways that relieve pressure on the health service. “The extra £8bn they’ve given for health. Great. Only, give them five, give us the other £3bn, and we’ll give them £6bn worth of outcome. And that way the government gets £11bn worth of benefit out of £8bn worth of cash. And we all get the benefit of not putting people in hospital who don’t need to be there.”

Failure to reverse the shrinking adult social care spend in local government from next April will be disastrous for the NHS, he predicts. “Forget about last year’s NHS winter of discontent – you wait and see what happens next year.”

Engaging and straight-talking, Porter is a bricklayer by trade, and a former trade unionist. He fell out with the left over the miners’ strike in the mid-1980s. He supported the cause, but not the Scargillite tactics (“I think we could have had the government over if we’d done it properly”) A Labour voter, he drifted away, politically disillusioned, for over a decade.

He was working as a builder, renovating a bungalow in Peterborough in 1996 when by chance a free newspaper published by the late Sir James Goldsmith’s Referendum party came through the letterbox. He read it during his lunch hour. Intrigued, he went to see Goldsmith speak in Northampton and was electrified (it was the moment, he recalls, when he “thought there might be something in this politics malarkey”). He didn’t care for Goldsmith’s Euro-scepticism. But he lapped up the anti-big government message.

Porter joined the Tory party soon afterwards, recruited by his friend and political ally John Hayes, MP for South Holland and The Deepings. He became a district councillor in 2001 and council leader two years later. When his peerage was announced in September, he celebrated over fish and chips with his wife at Jack’s Fish Bar in Spalding.

He admits to being bewildered at how far he has travelled. “The person sitting here,” he says pointing to himself, “doesn’t even think he’s Lord Porter. I still feel that I am standing behind the chair and it is someone else sat there, and I’m just reading over their shoulder.”

He hopes life becomes a little more comfortable. But not too much. “I like the fact that it is something special and not something that I expected, or believed I had a right to have. I don’t want to become one of those sort of people.”



Curriculum vitae

Age 55.

Status Married, two children.

Lives Spalding, Lincolnshire.

Education Collenswood school, Stevenage; De Montfort University, Leicester, history and politics; Canterbury Christ Church University, postgraduate certificate in shared services.

Career June 2015-present: chairman, Local Government Association; 2013- present: chairman, the Conservative Councillors Association; 2003-present: leader, South Holland district council; 2011-2015: Conservative group leader and vice chairman, LGA; 2009-2011: deputy chairman and chairman, LGA environment, housing and planning board; 2009-2011: chairman, the District Council Network; 2001: elected Conservative councillor, South Holland district council; non-political roles held include work in an industrial bakery; labourer, warehouse building site; contracts manager for a construction firm; and owner of small building firm, Bricklayer.

Interests Politics.