I’d like us to stop talking about public services as though the only strategic and structural issue facing us is spending cuts. In my view, the constraints on local services are diverse, inter-related and largely irreversible.

One of the important issues discussed at a Capital Ambition / London Collaborative seminar last week on responding to the recession was behaviour change. Barnet is likely to be the first of many authorities explicitly seeking to change the relationship between council and citizen, expecting people to be more self-reliant in the decisions they make.

It strikes me that nearly all the narrative around Barnet’s plans is about cost reduction. However, increased self-reliance and redesigned public services are the inevitable response to a range of constraints we face, not only the public finances. I would highlight security and wealth. Decision-makers need to understand the range of issues, as there seems to be a common understanding that we are now entering uncharted territory.

The two most pertinent examples of security constraints are food and energy. There is growing evidence that food supplies are much more vulnerable than we have imagined, and credible voices suggesting that state intervention in the choices we make about food is inevitable within a few years. On energy, we face both declining and insecure supply, and the need to burn much less fossil fuel. Most of the credible responses to this have a very strong local element.

On wealth, we face the challenge of operating local economies in a way that marries prosperity with rapidly reducing carbon emissions. I have written about understanding wealth in a different way, inspired by the Stiglitz Commission. We may keep up the pretence that our lifestyles are compatible with carbon budgets, but they are not, and the constraints on consumption and lifestyle are very difficult to address.

There are real dangers in only seeing one of the trees in the wood. One is the steady salami-slicing that is the inevitable response of managers who have only ever responded by cutting this or that aspect of a service, when they are asked to reduce budgets. It all looks too short-term in focus to me.

In similar vein, I hope that the promising Total Place programme will not fall into the same traps. It holds so much potential, not least for the type of whole-area approach, led by local government as a ‘first among equals’, that has us New Localists salivating. But such approaches need a long-term and wide-ranging perspective. The risk of falling into short-termism and salami-slicing would be reduced by an explicit focus on issues such as food and energy security. And, in the era of carbon budgets which has just dawned, it seems inevitable that a genuinely ‘whole place’ approach has to count carbon emissions – operational and in the wider community – as much as it counts the pennies.