As I write, the chancellor is sharpening his quill ready for another Autumn Statement that will affect local government and public services in a variety of ways.

A typical response to these events over the past decade or so has been ‘we expected bad news and this is slightly less bad news than we expected’. This does not take away the significant reductions to funding that every council has faced, because as always, we find some way of balancing the books, although this often results in the level of service to our customers and communities being less than we would wish to provide.