(Photo by Jack Taylor/Getty Images)

Next time you see your bins collected, the street being cleaned or check a book out of the library, remember that these are the functions of a “banana republic”. This is the term the Reform UK leader Nigel Farage has used to describe the decision by more than a third of councils to delay their elections in May. His party, set to sweep up a load of seats on polling day, is challenging the government over this issue in the High Court.

Councils in England’s shires are in the process of the biggest restructuring in more than 50 years, which will ultimately reduce the number of local authorities and councillors. The government’s argument is that it wanted to give councils undergoing this reorganisation the chance not to use up tight resources on elections – when they’re due to abolish themselves by 2028 anyway. Elections have been postponed under previous governments for this reason, after all.

It sounds like a convenient excuse for Labour to avoid elections that will be disastrous for the party, though – an accusation it should have done everything to avoid. The Electoral Commission says capacity constraints are not “a legitimate reason for delaying long-planned elections”.

But from the individual councils’ perspective, this is just another horrible trade-off in the brutal zero-sum exercise of balancing a local authority budget. For a decade and a half, they have been making all manner of Hobson’s choices inevitably at the expense of their voters.

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Local authorities’ legal duty to deliver evermore expensive services – such as social care, special educational needs provision and temporary accommodation for the homeless – has meant cutting other vital amenities, rotting the public realm. Their residents, faced with constant rises in council tax and less to show for it, have noticed.

Many councils in this time have reached bankruptcy, or as close to. Cancelling elections is just another bleak option for them in the era of Forever Austerity.

This is all having a profound impact on councillors’ ability to do their jobs – or even to take them up in the first place. New polling of councillors in England, shared exclusively with the *New Statesman *by the Local Government Chronicle, reveals that 86 per cent find it difficult to recruit or retain enough individuals to stand for election.

Abuse from the public is cited as the biggest deterrent to people standing for election, or standing for more the one term. Eighty-five per cent of councillors are concerned about online abuse, and 78 per cent about in-person abuse.

It doesn’t help that a majority of councillors will earn less than the minimum wage for their council work. The average councillor’s allowance is £12,500, and 64 per cent polled said they spend 20 hours or more a week on council duties. The majority, at 54 per cent, don’t feel fairly compensated and agree with the statement that they are “financially penalised for making an important contribution to my community”. Most working-age councillors have to combine their roles with paid employment. (By contrast, Scotland pays councillors a basic annual salary of £25,982.)

There are more than 16,000 councillors serving on England’s 315 principal councils (excluding town and parish councils). Between them, they are responsible for almost £100bn of spending on key services. But, according to the poll, three-quarters say public understanding of their role and impact is poor.

Faced with yet another lose-lose choice from central government over cancelling elections, their reputation is taking another hit – degrading the relationship between townhall and public further. Just look at the “Nazi” name-calling and police being called to a Redditch Borough Council vote to delay elections last week. Expect a grim build-up to those elections, whether they all take place or not, in May.

[Further reading: Inside the Labour factions pressuring Starmer to rejoin Europe]

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