Cookies

We use cookies to ensure that we give you the best experience on our website. By continuing to browse this repository, you give consent for essential cookies to be used. You can read more about our Privacy and Cookie Policy.


Durham Research Online
You are in:

Newcastle City Council and the grassroots : accountability and budgeting under austerity.

Ahrens, T. and Ferry, L. (2015) 'Newcastle City Council and the grassroots : accountability and budgeting under austerity.', Accounting, auditing and accountability journal., 28 (6). pp. 909-933.

Abstract

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to shed light on new accountability relationships between Newcastle City Council (NCC) and its citizens and stakeholders in the wake of the British government’s austerity politics and its budget cuts for local authorities. It seeks to show some of the ways in which various kinds of budgeting, for example, for alternative sources of funding, the use of volunteers for service provision, resource sharing, and asset transfers, as well as a diverse set of accounts of the social implications of resource diversions and service cuts, have been implicated in those changes. Design/methodology/approach – The authors conducted a qualitative field study of some of the uses of budgets in the shaping of accountability relationships through interviews with council officers, conversations with activists and citizens, analysis of council and other documents, and observation of public meetings and demonstrations. The approach focused on the relationship between the city’s political grassroots and the NCC leadership and administration. Findings – The authors find that NCC’s senior politicians and officers co-opted the city’s political grassroots and managed to reconstitute local political accountability to citizenry and stakeholders as a choice between the cessation of different types of local government services, by combining appeals to the legal framework of English local authorities, the unfairness of national politics, and the fairness of local government service provision. Local government blamed the funding cuts and the resulting resource shortages on the central government. It sought to push responsibility for cuts to the local citizenry whilst reserving for itself the role of mediator and adjudicator who makes the final decisions about the portfolio of causes that will be funded. Originality/value – This is the first study to offer detailed insight into the effects of the British government’s austerity budget cuts of local authority grants on the politics of accountability in a local authority.

Item Type:Article
Keywords:Accountability, Austerity, Localism, Budgeting, Local government, Grassroots politics.
Full text:(AM) Accepted Manuscript
Download PDF
(336Kb)
Status:Peer-reviewed
Publisher Web site:http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/AAAJ-03-2014-1658
Publisher statement:This article is © Emerald Group Publishing and permission has been granted for this version to appear here (http://dro.dur.ac.uk/16682/). Emerald does not grant permission for this article to be further copied/distributed or hosted elsewhere without the express permission from Emerald Group Publishing Limited.
Date accepted:No date available
Date deposited:28 October 2015
Date of first online publication:17 August 2015
Date first made open access:17 August 2017

Save or Share this output

Export:
Export
Look up in GoogleScholar