The Barnet Council's Graph Of Doom From 2011 Turned Out To Be Startlingly, Horribly Accurate As Funding Falters

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In 2011, two senior council managers in north London put together a PowerPoint graph that they felt might help kick off a useful discussion with colleagues about the future of local government. What would happen, they asked, if town hall funding flatlined, while demographic pressures continued to rise steadily? The answer, they suggested, lay in what became known as the Barnet Graph of Doom. It indicated that the council would, within 20 years, expend all its available resources on meeting the needs for adult social care and children’s services. There would be simply be no cash left for libraries, parks, leisure centres or even bins.

The Graph of Doom became a kind of meme in policy circles, a bleak joke, reality check and austerity warning. The late former head of the civil service Bob Kerslake was known to feature it in presentations. Birmingham city council produced its own version in 2012, labelled the “Jaws of Doom”, which its former leader Sir Albert Bore suggested depicted the “end of local government as we know it”.

“We were trying to explain to colleagues that just as the party was over for bankers [post-crash], so the era of growth would be over for the public sector and there would be less money around,” recalls Nick Walkley, Barnet’s chief executive at the time. “It was not meant as a predictive model. We wanted people to start thinking through strategic priorities.”

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But has even this endless squeezing reached its limit? Conservative-run Hampshire county council warned in October that it would face financial “meltdown” within the next 18 months without some kind of government intervention. It was no longer possible, it said, to meet the boundlessly growing cost of social care simply by continuing to reduce or close non-core services. Some councils are starting to discuss a graph of doom-ish scenario, where the price of keeping statutory social care services in place is the abandonment of the rest of the council’s functions. Next year, Hampshire argues, either the government bails out councils, or it reduces their statutory burden to allow them to do less. “These are not problems we can fix on our own,” it says.

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https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2024/jan/28/barnet-councils-graph-of-doom-now-looks-prophetic

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1. Social Care is the first statutory responsibility of local councils

And with an aging population, the cost of adult social care is spiralling. That's one big part of the financial crisis in local government.

Another part of it is the ongoing housing crisis forcing more people to turn to social housing. And with no room left for error or risk, then there's instances where local councils have made bad investments. Not to mention that inflation is as much a problem for the public sector as it is for everybody else.

These are problems for all local authorities, not just those of one party or another.