13 january 2011, the cuts come to town

And so finally, after the months of phoney war, as expectations went up and down, the size and consequence of "the cuts" comes into focus. Several councils up here have already announced numbers: 800 in oldham, 500 (maybe) in bolton, 400 in bury and stockport and today a whopping 2, 000 in 1 year in manchester, which always has to do everything bigger and better than everyone else. Plans were well advanced for taking 50 million out of the budget, but in the end the bottom line was 110, neccessitating this rather drastic news, which has gripped the council. Their leader talks about redistribution from poor areas like manchester to those more affluent, which is certainly a noticeable effect as various extra funding lines that successive governments, especially the last one, created to improve the amounts going to the worst-off areas, especially northern cities, have been wound up. Manchester, for all that it is a beacon of growth and centre of the second largest economy in the country, imports most of its skilled labour daily, and has no less than 66% of its resident population in the UK's 20% most deprived. It is also at the heart of greater manchester's drive to find innovative and hard hitting ways to reduce dependency and create efficiencies, not least through the ten councils acting as one (23 oct), and the big risk of all this is that each organisation pulls down the shutters and has neither the stomach nor inspiration for innovation as the cuts begin to take up every last ounce of everyone's energy and attention.