all that adding up, but still nineteen shillings and sixpence

I had a jolly afternoon as vice-chair of the Audit and Accounts committee of the county council last week, with a few hundred pages of accounts and financial notes to wade through. The presentation of the annual accounts has improved though and the committee thanked the finance and pension officers for all their hard work.

I was interested to note that, in terms of historical artefacts, the county has stored somewhere over a thousand human skeletons from various archeological digs. 

More seriously, much more seriously, these are difficult and challenging times for county councils in particular, because the statutory responsbilities for adult social care, as well as education and children's needs, take a very large chunk of the reducing budget, so that areas such as transport and road repairs seem to be falling behind people's expectations, even though they too get some significant investment. The funding from government is set to continue to fall, so that the county council faces greater cuts to its budgets unless it can find ways of income generation. Cambs County Council spent about £390m last year. This year it has to save £29m and next year £33m, and so on.

The pension fund black hole is also getting bigger, having grown by some 27% last year, even though the county invests its pensions funds very well and makes a lot of money for its pension holders. 

We noted at the meeting the distinctly less optimistic projected turnover from the LGSS, the service set up between Cambridgeshire andNorthamptonshire  county councils to run shared back office functions and provide those services to other public bodies, such as the fire service and other councils. So no "get out of jail" card there for the county's finances.

I noted a report into Birmingham City Council published this week which basically said there was a sense of denial of the challenges current and coming up for that huge Brummegem enterprise. What was needed -said this report - was strategic leadership to transform local services so that they are efficient and responsive. I could add to that the need for a significant amount of digital interaction with local residents as a way of improving services while reducing transaction costs. Let's hope we find a way forward for Cambridgeshire that seems to have eluded the resourceful midlanders.