MY county council spends almost a billion pounds per annum.

Approximately half is spent on schools where we have less and less influence under Michael Gove’s agenda, where schools’ budgets are prescribed centrally.

Like the rest of local government, we have had a significant level of cuts to make as our contribution to the coalition government’s deficit reduction programme.

We have been successful in making these cuts because we anticipated them well before the General Election and started planning for them early.

We are going to have to take £119m out of the 50 per cent controllable element of our billion pound budget over the next four years.

We have taken the decision to ringfence two areas of spending: social care for vulnerable children and our fire and rescue service.

We took the view that other service areas should take a proportionate share of the cuts.

When we presented our plans for implementing this decision, our electorate could see that we were proposing over four years to cut social care spending by £31m, highways spending by £13m, waste management by £4m and library services by £2m.

Given the scale of the planned cuts, you might expect a caring population to express anger about cuts to care for older people, about the impact of cuts on the highway network and congestion and about the impact of cuts on recycling.

None of these concerns materialised to any significant extent.

The single area of huge campaigning activity was our library service.

Residents rose up in our city, towns and villages to demand that we keep all of our 43 libraries open.

Their campaign was managed by a local lefty with a track record of opposition to almost every budget cut in health and local government for the last 20 years.

They secured the support of authors such as Philip Pullman and Colin Dexter, well known Oxford lefties, but also Peter Hitchens – not an icon of the left – and Kirsty Young, who has recently moved to the county.

Less well known but active locally were Greens, anarchists, liberals and hard left activists.

It is all part of Oxford’s rich cultural and political fabric!

I was saddened that, deficit deniers apart, these largely well-heeled worthies refused to accept that reducing library cuts would add to the cuts to other services – most likely social care and highways.

It is clear many of them had little understanding of social care.

That a single learning disabled client can cost a six-figure sum each year of their lives.

That decent domiciliary care can help an old person live an independent life longer and much better than if they entered residential care.

Everyone involved in social care has a critical role to raise the public profile of social care.

I am afraid the village shop, school, pub and library will always score highly with electors because of their visibility while the importance of social care will remain invisible to most electors until they or their loved ones need it.

Keith Mitchell is Conservative councillor for Adderbury, Bloxham, Bodicote, Milcombe and Milton. He has been leader of Oxfordshire County Council since 2001.

  • This article first ran in The Guardian on Wednesday.