Over a long period, local government budgets have come to be shaped not by the requirement to deliver services or by the local population's need to use those services, but by the total size of the budgetary cake and how that has changed year on year. A process may start out at a given point with a range of services but, over a 10 or 15-year period, those services may change shape, shrink or evolve, often exclusively in relation to budget reductions.