Councils’ complaints on cuts "wearing thin" says PM

COUNCIL complaints about cuts are “wearing rather thin” as local authorities’ claims about the impact of cuts on services have proved to be unfounded, Prime Minister David Cameron has said.

Speaking to TheBusinessDesk.com on Friday as part of his two-day regional tour of the North West, he said difficult decisions had been taken for the good of the economy and that the Northern Powerhouse initiative was the first to coherent policy by any government to address the North/South economic divide.

Last week Liverpool Mayor Joe Anderson claimed in an interview with The Guardian that: “The Tories have kicked the sh*t out of us, and the Lib Dems have held their coat,”  stating that by 2017 Liverpool will have lost more than half of its government grant compared with 2010, from £514m to £264m.

Mr Cameron said: “Frankly it’s easy politics to try and blame everything on the cuts. I think some local Labour leaders have said this so often that it’s starting to wear rather thin.

“Of course we have had to make difficult decisions about council funding, but the satisfaction with local government services has gone up across the country, the North West included.

“Local councils have demonstrated they can do more with less. We have had years of warnings from council leaders that spending reduction will lead to catastrophic results, but that simply hasn’t been born out by the facts.”

He added: “Councils have demonstrated that they can keep council tax down, they can provide better services at a lower cost, and I don’t think we should find that surprising. Business people every day go to work thinking ‘how can I reduce my cost base and providing a better service’ and that is what we have to do in government, central government and local government too. 

The Prime Minister said the Northern Powerhouse represented a step-change in the approach to regional economic strategy.

He said: “I think what’s different is that in the past, policy has been about ‘let’s move a few jobs out of London, let’s come up with little bits of extra money’.  This is a far more comprehensive effort to rebalance the economy of our country.

“The vision that I and the Chancellor and the Conservative Party have is that if you link up the strength of all our northern cities, you have a northern powerhouse to rival London.”