Cuts in my 'hood: how will Camden suffer?

David Cameron says we're all in this together - but if you delve just a little into the distorted, abusive relationship between central and local government, it is staggering how little is actually being slashed from most Whitehall budgets. And how much is being demanded of London's town halls.

Camden, the vast sprawling borough that extends from areas of acute deprivation in the south around King's Cross up through the leafy reaches of Primrose Hill, Belsize Park and all affluent points north, has to extract £92 million from its spending in the next three years, a total budget cut of some 23 per cent.

The council knew there would be cuts whoever won last year's general election, so 250 jobs have already been shed. By the time the current £12 million redundancy programme is finished, Camden's head count should have shrunk by 970 people, out of a total of around 4,500 staff.

Because town hall autonomy has been undermined over the years by successive central government administrations, there is no real option but to cut spending drastically rather than increase revenue. Whitehall controls the spigot of spending and there is no meaningful local democratic accountability.

More than 60 per cent of the money Camden disburses comes directly in grants from Whitehall. Another 30 per cent or so is raised by council housing rents, and fees and rental of Camden-owned commercial property. But less than 10 per cent of total spending is raised by council tax, which means the vast holes in the overall budget cannot realistically be plugged by increases there.

The cuts will hurt and are already hurting, says councillor Theo Blackwell, head of finance in the Labour-run administration that took over from the previous Lib-Dem/Conservative ruling group at the last local elections. "People tell us we can do it by cutting back office operations but the idea that budget cuts on this scale can be made this way is just bulls**t," he says.

And this is how the cuts are rolling around the borough, affecting the deprived immigrant communities to the south and reducing the options for yummy-mummies to the north who are angry that their little darlings' play centres and music lessons are under threat.

WHERE THE AXE WILL FALL IN CAMDEN

LIBRARIES
For those of us who inhabit the bookish Camden Town/Primrose Hill borders, it began with the libraries. Alan Bennett, our very own local national treasure who honed his young mind in the public libraries of his native Leeds, pre-emptively declared a few months back that any closures would amount to "child abuse".

A tad "luvvie" in his language, perhaps, but he was right to sound the alarm. With wearisome inevitability, Camden has since announced that it intends to save £500,000 a year by giving up on three small libraries.

Those doomed are in Hampstead, Belsize Park and Primrose Hill, where Bennett can be found using the photocopying machine, and where Mayor Boris Johnson, who lived around the corner in Regent's Park Road as a boy, read his first Ladybird Book of the Ancient World.

Labour-run Camden concedes that these three libraries have been selected because they are in the most prosperous areas of the borough and challenges concerned residents to volunteer to run them themselves in the manner of David Cameron's Big Society.

Bennett is doubtless right that libraries are a good thing but in truth they can be expensive and inefficient. There was much anguish in the local papers when it was announced that the mobile library van was to be abolished, though the cost of the service, it turns out, works out at £24.53 per customer visit and only four of the people who use it are registered disabled. It would be cheaper to give the regular users vouchers to order their books on Amazon.

BINS
The next big cuts have been levelled at the previously magnificent bin collection system. We Camden residents never understood all the fuss in the Mail and Telegraph about the scandal of fortnightly bin collections in the Home Counties, and their rotting piles of fish guts and discarded chicken bones being gnawed by predatory foxes.

Our binmen - privatised, affable, and overwhelmingly Eastern European -came twice a week without fail, braving snow and ignoring bank holidays. From this month we're down to once a week, which is a shame, but certainly no great hardship.

More worrying is the allied cuts to street cleaning. Restaurant and bar owners have already been warned that they will have to take more responsibility for keeping the areas around their premises clean but we'll have to see how that works in practice, and whether even more rats will soon be scurrying around Camden Town. The street lights are to be dimmed more frequently, too, much to the delight of Camden's large Green lobby.

CHILDREN
Most departments have been ordered to make a 20 per cent cut though money spent under the early years budget is to be reduced less, by around 10 per cent. But at least one children's centre will have to close, and the guaranteed 25 hours of free childcare that has been on offer to three- to four-year-olds will now be limited only to poor parents while other parents will be entitled only to the 15-hour statutory requirement.

Parents will feel the heat, too, in cuts to the £4.2 million provision for after-hours activities and clubs at schools which take care of children for working parents at the end of the day. This budget is expected to halve in size, with disproportionate impact in the richer parts of the borough.

SCHOOLS
The cuts will certainly be felt in the overall schools budget, where Camden spent lavishly in the good times. This was first apparent last year when Michael Gove killed Labour's capital school building programme, which he said was absurdly inefficient, and almost certainly was.

The first consequence of this was cancellation of the plan to demolish and then double the size of our local Church of England primary school at the foot of Primrose Hill, to the great relief of parents, including the present writer.

But it has left a serious problem in the south of the borough, where many under-achieving schools are languishing with shockingly inadequate buildings which will not now be upgraded with Whitehall money.

On top of this, Camden has historically spent far above the statutory benchmarks on special-needs provision in schools, and this will have to be pared back. In the richer parts of the borough, middle-class mums are cross that subsidised one-on-one after-school music lessons are to be cut back.

The council says social workers will no longer work within schools on early intervention, while the centrally funded Building Bridges project for disaffected youths will be effectively scrapped. Cllr Blackwell says that to fill the void left by the scrapping of the central capital school building programme, Camden has been forced to earmark about £100 million of property assets that need to be sold off.

COUNCIL HOUSING
Big savings are to be made in council housing, with above-inflation rent increases and reductions in services. Camden has closed most of the offices dealing with council tenants, who will now have to ring a call centre.

Rather than directly perform repairs on council houses, Camden is to offer vouchers to buy DIY kits for the tenants to do the work themselves. Non-essential work in communal areas will no longer be done, so it will be up to residents to club together to do it. They may also have to pay for their underground parking spots, which many residents have been renting out for profit if not needed.

Given the shortage of new council housing stock coming on stream, it was no surprise that our local MP Frank Dobson was recently embarrassed when it was reported that for the past 30 years he has been living in Camden social housing in a handsome mansion block at a hugely subsidised rent.

SOCIAL CLUBS
The cuts will be felt by the elderly in spending on social clubs, with reductions in provision for lunch clubs which are designed to get them out to socialise, and the young. The Talacre sports centre in Kentish Town, loved by footballers, gymnasts and middle-class parents for its suitability as a children's birthday party venue, is to be farmed out to private contractors, with uncertain consequences. The Mornington Sports Centre in Camden Town will be closed in 2012, only a year after an expensive refurbishment during which its exercise equipment was replaced.

VOLUNTARY GROUPS
In theory, under David Cameron's Big Society dream, concerned local residents and charities should pick up the slack. We shall see, but one of the largest proposed cuts is to Camden's funding of voluntary groups, down from £6.5 million to about £4 million.

Labour councillors say the idea that charities are going to declare they will take over services that the council can no longer run is absurd - charity income has been squeezed in all sorts of ways, partly by low deposit rates which have disproportionately affected the elderly, the most generous donors.

But what is difficult to gauge is the extent to which lavish council provision snuffs out the volunteer or charitable impulse. Several small libraries in neighbouring Westminster already rely heavily on well-heeled women of a certain age donating their time in the cause of literacy.

The rates of volunteering in Camden libraries are pathetic by contrast, and one senses that this is in part due to a mentality in a Labour-run council which often seems to assume that the unionised town hall staff know best.

Councillor Andrew Mennear, the opposition Tory leader, says Camden historically has been a high-cost council offering services beyond what was legally required. He says some of the high-profile cuts the Labour ruling group has earmarked are designed to make a point about national politics, and could be avoided.

We shall see who is right in the next three years, when the cuts bite deeper and tempers fray as the shutters come down on 13 years of uninterrupted expansion of town hall spending.