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.”
Back then, though, austerity was in its infancy, and local government was still relatively brimming with confidence and resources. There was widespread disbelief that such a scenario could come to pass, and the graph would often be seen as a provocation, says Walkley: “Even at that time it seemed quite shocking that an authority would have to choose between libraries and adult social care.”
Thirteen years later, the graph of doom has not come to pass, at least not yet. But it has proved far more prescient an indicator of travel than its authors envisaged. Council funding has shrunk by roughly 40% over the period, demand for social care has continued to rise, and councils have made room for these growing costs by shutting down other services.
Top-tier local authorities’ remaining spending power is increasingly dominated by adults and child social care, for which they have defined legal and regulatory duties. The two services can take up as much as 70% of council budgets, at the expense of what have come to be known as “discretionary” services such as parks, leisure centres, arts, youth clubs, children’s centres, community buses, recycling and climate change.
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.
Looking back, Walkley says it was assumed the graph would never come to pass because the government would step in to solve the crisis in adult social care. It was an age of optimism for councils, and doing nothing did not seem to be an option. But ministers ducked the social care funding question, and the need for children’s services has exploded unchecked. “We never envisaged an un-solution,” says Walkley.
