WHAT would you cut if you were council leader?

It depends on how the options are presented, and ‘any services I don’t use’ would be many people’s honest answer.

But if Lancashire County Council’s annual survey of residents is to be believed, the county’s museums are most people’s first-choice sacrifice.

According to County Hall’s annual Life in Lancashire panel, 54per cent of people ranked museums at the bottom of the list of options they were given, for the third year in a row.

The findings were noted at last week’s cabinet meeting, where finance chief Phil Halsall - soon to become Chief Executive - posed the rhetorical question of who would provide museums if the council pulled out.

Top priorities

Services for older people
Primary and secondary education
Crime prevention.

Lowest priorities

Museums
Country parks, open spaces and picnic sites
Trading standards.

Councillors hardly seemed surprised at the outcome of the survey.

Labour leader Jennifer Mein remarked that the results are the ‘same every year’.

She’s not wrong - the top and bottom three have not changed for the past three years.

The outcome of County Hall’s online ‘you make the cuts’ tool, introduced for the first time this year with the help of the government, will be known in the next few weeks.

As far as the £179million cuts unveiled last week are concerned, there are no obvious reductions in the museums budget - although some may be hidden in the small print, or classed as ‘efficiencies’.

Among the other low-ranked services, parking charges are being introduced for the county’s country parks and picnic sites, and trading standards response times are being increased.

But given that barely any services have escaped the axe in some form, it’s not entirely clear how much impact the 1,972 people who returned their questionnaires have made.