Many now acknowledge austerity-driven thinking and practices are endemic to the culture and behaviours of local government. A decade and a half in and we have become acclimatised to having no money and, in becoming impoverished, in the vast majority of cases, we have become short-termist technocrats. Trimmers, cutters, slashers, increasingly expert in the science of reduction and cessation.

If necessity is the mother of invention, then what we appear to have come up with is a culture in which doing less through increasing technical proficiency has become dominant. We haven't been able to innovate ourselves out of austerity, partly due to the rate at which we have had to manage on less – and now incontrovertibly insufficient – funding; and partly because innovation was never endemic in the sector and it has hardly been a period during which its cultivation has been possible. We know what happens to R&D monies when frontline services are under threat.