In an exclusive interview, council leader Grace Williams says that her priority remains ‘safeguarding’ services for residents

By Marco Marcelline

Waltham Forest Council leader Grace Williams has said she is not overseeing a “downward spiral” in public services, amid planned
efficiency savings of £18million across the next two years.

Speaking to the Echo, Cllr Williams insisted that the biggest portion of planned cuts, a £4.5m saving to the adult social care budget through “reviews” of how it is offered, will not affect quality of service for residents.

Cllr Williams says care workers have been left “firefighting” because of an “explosion of [care] need” following the pandemic. This has meant local authorities have just been “busy keeping the show on the road”, she says, a task which has become harder because the government “won’t [and] hasn’t reformed social care”.

She returns to her point that budget savings will not lead to a “downward spiral” in care quality: “My strong commitment is that we can make change while safeguarding services for those residents”.

Describing her approach to spending, she says: “I’m quite an evidence-based person. I like to look at everything. My brief to [council] officers has been: ‘let’s look at everything we’re doing. Is it good enough? Is it value for money?’, rather than, ‘oh, that bit looks like it could be chopped off.’ That’s not how we [as a council] operate.”

Could there be greater public scrutiny of council spending decisions to make sure that residents are on board with planned budget savings before they are finalised, however? Cllr Williams responds saying that “we do have a public meeting where our budget proposal is shown in full”.

She adds: “Most of the changes that we are making are management actions which shouldn’t have any impact on residents because they’re about council systems working better. Where there’s going to be a service change, there will be a full consultation.”

A council press officer attending the interview interjects to say: “There’s no public organisation that holds public scrutiny meetings when you’re coming up with a budget; the NHS doesn’t, schools don’t.”

One of the planned management actions is a “review” of the libraries service “operating model”, a move which is projected to save £550,000.

Asked if this means if library closures are on the horizon, Cllr Williams says: “We really still believe in libraries. What we want to make sure of is that we’re putting our resources in the right place. We also need to be realistic that some of the libraries we have are assets that are very, very hard for us to maintain. I can’t sit here and say it’s going to mean that all the libraries stay open
or that any libraries are going to shut. Reimagining libraries means that we put more [council] services into them, for example.”

On the topic of selling council buildings to make extra cash, Cllr Williams said there was more of a focus on monetising venues through commercial partnerships or ventures while still holding onto them as assets.

“I think the view that the two choices you have are either keeping [buildings] and leaving everything just as it is, or selling [assets] off is quite old-fashioned. We’ve got really good examples of where we’ve been able to do something that’s a bit more sustainable and clever. Look at the Vestry House Museum; we’re not closing it, we’re not locking it down, but we’re looking at how we can sustain it so that partners take on, or commercial operators take on some of the responsibility for it.”

Councils across the country are nearing a financial breaking point. In September, Birmingham City Council issued a Section 114 notice, and has since raised council tax by a whopping 21%. Meanwhile, Croydon Council has declared itself effectively bankrupt three times already, and Havering Council appears to be on life support, having asked the government for a £54m loan to stave off bankruptcy.

So is Cllr Williams confident that she has done enough to avoid the same outcome for Waltham Forest? She responds: “We’ve got two years where we’ll need to make some really tough, responsible choices that will bring in savings of £15m and transform services at the same time. If we do those things, I’m confident [we can stave off bankruptcy].

“But, I think I would only be entirely confident if we had a government that was placing financial sustainability of local authorities [at the top of] its inbox and saying, we will do these things.”

Some critics of the council argue that it could avert making cuts and that it is not putting up enough of a fight to the government. “We could spend literally every day [telling the government] ‘give us this!’. I think there is an element now that this has gone on so long that it’s quite hard to lobby a government that is not even making the pretence of operating effectively. So lots of the things that you might expect from the government such as listening to local authorities are no longer being done,” Cllr Williams said.

When asked if a change of government is what the council needs to change its fortunes, Cllr Williams was keen to emphasise that there’s “no magic money tree” that Labour can rely on to “fix ten plus years of local public services being cut” through austerity.

However, she clarified that she had confidence in Labour having “a plan to work with local authorities, health partners, police and schools” if they get in. “Labour can be trusted when it comes to reforming public services. That doesn’t mean it’s going to be easy, I think it’s going to be really, really tough. But for me, the solution is to have an ambitious government that’s got a vision and I think that’s what Labour offers.”

You can read the budget on the council’s website

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