When the last CIPFA resilience index was released in December 2019, a pandemic was a thing that happened in disaster movies and history books. After a decade of austerity, local government was limping on with a faltering funding system, looking for ways to transform services rather than salami slice savings.

Public services were squeezed, there was no solution in sight for adult social care and local government reorganisation was increasingly mooted as a cost saving exercise for the most cash-strapped councils.