No-one should be too surprised by the scale of cuts in local authority spending announced by the Government yesterday. In fact, given the size of our national debt, it is not unreasonable to suggest that some might be surprised that the figure wasn’t larger.

But we shouldn’t get too excited: more cuts are certainly on the way. Meanwhile, Bradford Council has to figure out how to find the £7.3 million it has been asked to give back from its 2010-11 budget of £740 million.

It has been given a good deal of help because the savings must come from certain target areas and those identified are largely schemes which local councils were told to spend money on by the previous Labour government, although they will be able exercise a fair amount of discretion in the detail.

Such cuts are all too commonplace in private business, where the demands of shareholders dictate that if short-term profit margins and profit growth start to slip, overheads have to be cut to maintain the bottom line even if that means damaging a company’s longer-term prospects.

It’s a hard lesson the public sector has to learn fast in the current climate – a fact acknowledged in Bradford earlier this week when University experts were called in to help teach Council executives how to adapt. The starting point in any such exercise has to be: “what is the minimum level of service we are willing to provide?” In our current national situation the only answer is likely to be “the basics.” If councils can concentrate on effective core service provision at the expense of political, vote-chasing initiatives, this crisis will be over all the sooner.