All change at Devon County Council. After 16 years of Conservative administrations a new regime will be in place. It was time for a change.

Things had become stale and complacent combined with a mood of denial surrounding the county’s finances.

Year after year we were told everything was fine and another balanced budget was produced. But year after year the budget was propped up using reserves. As any fool knows, you can only use reserves once.

As a county we used to have a relatively healthy set of reserves, placed around the middle of the pack. No more. Reserves have dwindled from £300 million to around £70 million leaving us as about the worst placed county council in the country.

It’s true times have been tough with £100s of millions worth of cuts from central government. It called for a new way of delivering services, but Devon chose to press on as before mimicking the proverbial ostrich, with its head stuck well and truly in the sand.

Many of our local parishes and towns have been frustrated with the council’s refusal to work together. From the installation of speed signs (VASs) to the painting of road markings, any approach from the community has been rebuffed. In many cases the community has offered to pay or at least part fund the scheme, but every time ‘computer says no’ has been the response. Like a severe form of control freakery, if it’s not the council’s idea, then it’s not going to happen.

In itself these examples aren’t going to save the council running costs, but it’s an example of how there has been a resistance for the council to work in meaningful partnerships.

It’s sink or swim time. Either we carry on as before and probably be bankrupt by Christmas, or look to work in co-operative and constructive partnerships. We need an urgent review of all the services we provide. Looking to see where others are delivering or could deliver the same, in many cases with better outcomes and at a fraction of the cost. Too often we have been happy to outsource to private contractors driven by profit, rather than work with those who share our public service ethos.

Of course none of this is helped by the government’s cack-handed attempt at Local Government Reorganisation (LGR.) An inordinate amount of time, effort and resources is being spent reorganising the deckchairs. Plymouth are pushing ahead with their shameless land grab in the South Hams. Exeter is trying to go back in time to when they nearly became a unitary in 2010. Neither has given a thought to the rest of Devon. It’s clear central government hasn’t got a clue what it’s doing. To spend a ‘Teams’ meeting confronted by ministers behaving like startled rabbits and civil servants barely out of school all driven by management consultants spouting tosh would be funny if it wasn’t so serious.