IN FEBRUARY of this year I reported that my own county council, Northamptonshire, had quite simply gone bust. Now it seems, just as I predicted, that another Tory council, Torbay in Devon, has run out of money too.

In Northampton Tory government cuts had driven this Tory council to issue a section 114 notice — the nearest thing to bankruptcy for a local authority, which by law are not allowed to actually declare themselves insolvent.

At 10 to five on Friday evening, when most staff had packed up and were heading for home, the cowardly management — some of whom would later get even more in golden handshakes — announced the news that the County of Northamptonshire had gone bust.

In fact most staff got the news by email, leading to a most stressful weekend for the harassed workers. Morale was already at rock-bottom and this made it much worse.

Ironically the Tory Treasury in Westminster sent in commissioners to work out how the Tory county council could get around the problems that the Treasury had caused with their local government cuts. (Sorry it’s so confusing, but we are talking about the same people.)

“Could they sell the new £53 million headquarters at One Angel Square?” asked the officials from the Treasury.

Alas nobody seemed interested in buying or renting. The new building only opened last October and already the council has tried to set up a sell-and-lease-back deal but nobody seems to want to buy.

Latest news from Northamptonshire is that workers who were told their jobs were safe are now being asked to take redundancy. At present it’s voluntary but we have all seen where that route so often finishes up.

When this fiasco happened in February I suggested Northamptonshire wouldn’t be the last Tory local authority to be driven to the wall by Tory government cash cuts.

I wasn’t wrong. Now in Tory Torbay the mayor, Councillor Gordon Oliver, has announced they are considering abandoning its unitary authority status.

Oliver has said: “We cannot survive as we are beyond this next financial year. There is no money.

“I am not crying wolf. I never cry wolf. We are too small to be a unitary authority and continue to fund these services.” Torbay Council’s majority Tory group backed the mayor when he put the proposal to the vote last week in a move at the full council meeting which even took some councillors by surprise.

From 2020 onwards the council would have to make up to £12m worth of cuts. “We cannot survive,” said the mayor. “There is a realisation among the Conservative councillors that we cannot carry on as we are. We are struggling like hell.

“The government is not putting any money in and we need to plan for that,” said Oliver. “We have got two years. Whoever wins the local election in May 2019, this has to be an all-party solution.

“The lack of money will drive economies of scale. Local authorities will have to work in partnership. Some of them are just too small as they are.”

The council has planned talks with the Local Government Association and with Devon County Council. The current arrangement under which Plymouth City Council oversees the bay’s children’s services will not be changed.

Before you are tempted to have much sympathy with Oliver and his council, perhaps I can remind you that Torbay is a council that has been criticised for spending four times more on beach huts than it did on affordable housing in just three years.

The Conservative council spent £2.35m on beach huts in 2013-2015, renting some for £2,500 a year. It spent just £470,000 on affordable housing during the same period.

In 2014 alone, Torbay Council spent £1.7m on beach huts and nothing on the development of affordable housing.  

Meanwhile, as Torbay Council employees fear for their jobs and their future, heading for a trip to the seaside will be the officials from the Treasury who caused all the trouble in the first place.

Not far behind them will be the few predatory bandits from some of the large accountancy firms — the very firms who have found themselves in the headlines and paying vast fines for all sorts of financial skulduggery — are waiting in the wings to claim some huge consultancy fees.

Perhaps some of us are expecting far too much — Torbay was after all the location of that impeccably run hotel we all used to know and love.

Why should we expect the local council to perform any better than Basil and Manuel at Fawlty Towers?