It’s surprising how long it took for financial catastrophe to hit the Tory-run council. The jaws of doom’ warning came five years agoTory-run Northamptonshire county council quietly issued a section 114 notice last Friday to sign that it had effectively gone bust,a victim of rapidly shrinking income and rising demand for the social care services it must legally provide. It is the first town hall to be brought down by austerity, but it may not be the last.
The surprise is not so much that it happened but that it took so long. The county has been stripping back its budget for years. Even in 2014, and when it unveiled its ambitious (and ultimately futile) “next generation” plan to try to set the council on a financially sustainable basis,it warned that assembly the demands of another five years of cuts was “getting towards the impossible”.
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Source: guardian.co.uk