Fresh evidence of the funding crisis facing local government has emerged after a second Tory-run council said it was preparing to cut back services to the bare legal minimum to cope with a cash shortfall that could leave it bankrupt within three years.

East Sussex county council said growing financial pressures and rising demand for social care were forcing it to restrict services to the most vulnerable residents only. Under this “core offer”, many of its services will be severely cut or shut down completely.

It said families and neighbourhood voluntary groups would have to take increasing responsibility for supporting those older people who would no longer qualify for social care support from the council under the new arrangements.

East Sussex’s outline of its strategic approach, revealed in a council paper last month, appears to have been adopted wholesale by Tory-run Northamptonshire county council, which this week adopted an emergency cuts plan to reduce services to skeleton levels as it attempts to close a £70m black hole in its budget during the next few months.

Northamptonshire’s financial collapse has been portrayed by ministers as being down to chronic mismanagement rather than lack of government funding. However, East Sussex is regarded as a stable and well-run council, giving authority and credibility to its shock warnings of the consequences of underfunding.

East Sussex said that without more government funding, stripping services back to a core offer would be the best it could afford to deliver, although it added that without a sea change in local authority finances even this most basic model of municipal service might be unaffordable by 2021.



The government insists that the funding arrangements for local government strike a balance between relieving the pressure on councils and keeping council tax bills down. A spokesperson for the Ministry of Housing, Communities & Local Government said: “We are providing local authorities with £90.7bn over the next two years to meet the needs of their residents. We are also giving them the power to retain the growth in business rates income and are working with local government to develop a funding system for the future based on the needs of different areas.”

It is understood a number of other English county councils are drawing up core offer budget scenarios as they prepare for an increasingly tight financial future. Councils’ collective funding shortfall will reach nearly £6bn by next year. “The core offer is going to be increasingly the norm,” one local government insider said.

East Sussex said it was reluctant to comment on its core offer strategy, but confirmed it would be further developed over the next few weeks. Its chief executive, Becky Shaw, has insisted the core offer “paints an honest picture of the minimum that we realistically need to provide in the future”.

A cabinet paper written by Shaw said that having made £129m of savings since 2010 and facing a budget deficit of up to £46m within three years, the council would have to “concentrate services on those in most urgent need and will not be able to maintain a comprehensive offer of universal services to all residents”.

Although it regarded extra funding as essential to the council’s survival, the paper was gloomy about the prospects of a swift government intervention to ease councils’ financial crisis, saying that Brexit and the announcement of extra funding for the NHS had limited ministers’ scope to address wider social issues.

Although the government has promised a review of how council funding is shared out and a green paper on social care funding for older people, the paper said any changes would not be in place until 2021 “which leaves us with difficult decisions to make about the services we provide with our remaining resources”.

It said the county’s rapidly ageing population – a third of residents will be over 65 by 2031– meant it could not maintain current levels of care. “Our community will therefore need to take more responsibility for looking after themselves and each other to keep everyone safe and independent as long as possible.”



The paper said some statutory services, such as home-to-school transport for schoolchildren, while crucial in a largely rural area, were prohibitively expensive and financially unsustainable in the currently climate, and it would press ministers to lift some of the duties it currently placed on councils.

“For example, the £8m we are obliged to spend on concessionary fares for older people would provide care packages to allow 700 of the most vulnerable people in this group to continue live independently,” the paper stated.

It said rising levels of poverty in the county had resulted in an increase in child neglect cases. Although the council had deployed “early help” services to successfully support families and prevent the surge in child protection cases seen elsewhere in the country, these services were now at risk.

East Sussex’s core offer proposals, which were published and discussed at a meeting of senior councillors last month, appear to have been heavily plagiarised by Northamptonshire as it searches for a solution to its dire financial problems.



Whole passages of the East Sussex paper appear to have been cut and pasted into a discussion paper by the Northamptonshire county council leader, Matthew Golby, which was presented to an extraordinary meeting of the council held to discuss its dire finances on Wednesday evening.



There are minor differences of emphasis and tone in the Golby paper, which may reflect the greater urgency and scale of the crisis facing Northamptonshire. For example, while both versions promised to engage with local people, Northants added the rider that it would do so only “where required to by legislation”.

Similarly, while East Sussex promised that its core offer would “give the best possible customer service”, Northamptonshire, which is technically insolvent and faces having to make unprecedented levels of cuts, adapts this to the more downbeat “a reasonable level of customer service, within our means”.



A Northamptonshire spokesperson said: “Councils work together, through the Local Government Association, to share experience and best practice, to ensure we are making the best use of public funding and not duplicating effort. Northamptonshire has followed a path laid by others and East Sussex has done this particularly well.”

Meanwhile, Heather Smith, the former leader of Northamptonshire who stepped down in March after a critical inspector’s report, hit out at the current administration, calling them “slaves” to the county’s seven Conservative MPs, who include the leader of the house, Andrea Leadsom.

Smith, who resigned the Tory party whip on Friday, told Local Government Chronicle she had been made a scapegoat: “All I can say is what’s happening in Northamptonshire will come home to roost when there’s a general election and number of those MPs, who’ve done nothing to support Northamptonshire, will lose their jobs.