James McInnes: Labour's Scrooge moment to rural Devon

The rural services grant provided £120million nationally to support people in rural communities. This year Devon received a big chunk of that money -  £10.1million – with another £4million coming to our district councils.

We won’t finally set our budget for 2025/26 until next February but up to now we’d been on track to produce a balanced budget.  But, with this announcement about the rural services grant, the Government has thrown a large spanner in the works.

We don’t know if there will be any mitigation for the loss of the £10 million in our overall settlement just before Christmas.

But at the moment we are facing an immediate need to make further savings in our spending to offset the loss of this grant.

We are obviously urgently exploring all options across all our operations but this means we were not able to produce a target budget for last week’s Cabinet meeting. Instead that will now come before January’s Cabinet.

I intend to make my feelings about this known very loudly to the Government and, as the chairman of Team Devon which includes our districts, towns and parishes, we’ve agreed to make joint representations on behalf of all the residents of Devon. There will also be cross-party representations from the county council.

We all know services cost much more to provide in rural communities because of their sparse nature.

Our bill for getting children to school is one of the highest in the country – particularly in the secondary sector where students can live miles away from their nearest college.

It costs more to provide social care for our elderly and vulnerable residents because of the increased costs of carers getting from one rural village to the next rather than looking after people who live in the same street or neighbourhood.

And we have one of the biggest road networks in the country to maintain and repair.

This announcement has come so late into our budget-setting arrangements that we will now have to make further cuts from our operating costs and from the money we were expecting to spend next year on providing care, support and services for our young, elderly and vulnerable residents.

And last minute savings like this are never an efficient, effective or economic way of spending the money we raise from council taxpayers instead of our usual prudent planning.

 I’m afraid this is yet another assault on rural communities by this Labour Government.

We’ve already seen them hit farmers with the iniquitous inheritance tax proposals which threaten many of our family farms and the rural way of life they support and our many small businesses and employers with the rise in National Insurance contributions.

It also fails to recognise that there is real deprivation in Devon with some communities having some of the lowest wages in the country.