An over-lengthy and fractious meeting of the County Council’s General Purposes Committee this morning, as the development of the Council’s budget for next year begins.

The prospects are not good. Even if the battle against COVID goes well, the Council will need to find savings of £40M in the financial year starting next April. If COVID goes bad – and the evidence so far suggests cases are continuing to rise – then the savings needed could be over £82M.

It is unlikely, to put it mildly, that the Government will come charging over the hill with £82M in its pocket. And unless there is more cash coming Cambridgeshire’s way, the options available to the Council will mainly be ‘efficiency savings’, cuts to services, increased fees and charges, lucrative commercial investments*, and council tax.

(*Not working out so well at the moment – the money they put into buying student accommodation in Cambridge and leisure facilities in Wisbech isn’t making great returns in a pandemic.)

Already lines are being drawn ready for the political arguments that will last through to February’s budget meeting and beyond. The predictions we’ve been given so far assume that Conservative councillors running the Council will go for an increase of two per cent in council tax for adult social care (a service facing huge increases in need), but zero council tax increase for general services.

We don’t yet know what maximum council tax increase the Government will allow this coming year. In the past few years councils have been allowed to set rises of around two or three per cent without having to conduct a ruinously expensive referendum – and the Government generally assumes councils will do that. Assuming the maximum this coming year is of a similar level, it might be considered sensible to start building that figure into the calculations. (If the Council were to try to bridge the whole of a £40M funding gap by way of council tax increases, the rise would have to be about 15 per cent, and nobody – absolutely nobody – is suggesting that.)

Conservative councillors are talking about council tax rises being their last resort after every other option. Liberal Democrats are saying that while nobody relishes higher council taxes, cutting services and increasing charges will affect the most vulnerable population worst, and assuming an increase in council tax of a couple of per cent at this stage would help bridge that gap (albeit only partly in the scheme of the financial problems unfolding).

The Council is now approaching Government to ask for more financial support. That’s all well and good, but the Government will want to see the Council doing all it can to bridge its own gap – and appearing to resolutely stand against raising council tax at all probably won’t persuade the Government of the urgency of the Council’s case.

It’s also fair to say that the Conservative Council has been asking the Conservative Government for ‘fair funding’ for many years with little to show for it, and there’s no reason to assume they will have any better luck this year when COVID has already trashed most of the economy, and a no-deal Brexit in a couple of months’ time will trash the rest.

We could of course all be surprised, but seeing what the Government has just done to Greater Manchester doesn’t suggest that will be likely.