Kate Hall (by @skinnyvoice)

This week, Manchester city council drew one of Eric Pickles’ many short straws – Manchester is one of the northwest councils that faces Pickles’ ‘maximum’ 8.9% cut to ‘spending power.’

That 8.9% sounded all right. Pity the real figure is nothing like it. The truth is that the cut to Manchester’s grant is a cracking 21% and its revenue loss next year around £68.9m. Pickles’ sly maths has gone down like a cup of the cold proverbial in this part of the country – “thinks we’re too thick to count” was a line I heard several times this week as I travelled around the northwest. The 8.9% includes transferred (and ringfenced) NHS funds for adult care services, and council tax, which councils must – and may fail to – raise themselves. A consistent council tax take might be more of a challenge if fewer people are working and able to pay.

And fewer people will be working: hundreds of Manchester city council staff are already in line for redundancy, as are hundreds more at nearby Rochdale, Bury, Oldham and Stockport boroughs. The notion that they’ll all slot into private sector jobs is a fancy one. Unemployment in the northwest is running at 8.1% and rising nationally on the back of public sector job losses. A Wigan job centre worker told me the figures would worsen as seasonal adjustments were made for temporary retail jobs over Christmas. The government has scrapped the northwest development agency and nobody seems to know how and if replacement local enterprise partnerships will work.

For what it was worth (not a great deal, in my view), northwest MPs signed a letter to the Manchester Evening News this week which accused the coalition of politically-motivated attacks on the northwest’s poorest (and generally Labour-voting) boroughs. Dark mutterings too – and rightly so – about the near-free passes given by government to affluent southern boroughs like Dorset and Surrey. With real-scale grants cuts of around four and six percent, well-appointed Conservative boroughs have largely escaped the scythe.

“Is the government saying it is fair that an elderly person in Manchester who needs a home help should miss out so the Conservatives can help their friends in leafy Surrey?” MP for Manchester Central Tony Lloyd asked in the MEN.

Whether Labour would have said anything different, or come good with savings ideas that spared the most vulnerable, is another story (and one I’m not convinced that Ed Miliband is telling). Hazel Blears was one of the signatories to the MEN letter, which didn’t exactly make you want to invest in it. At least one reader of that letter tends to associate Hazel with a £13,000 capital gains diddle, rather than public spirit.

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God only knows what this will all mean for people who depend on public services. Things are already difficult for them, and the cuts haven’t even taken hold.

I spent an afternoon this week with a young woman who relies on Manchester public services as they exist.

Kate Hall is 24 and has the debilitating Ehlers-Danlos syndrome (a serious disorder of connective tissues) and associated fibromyalgia. These seem extremely unpleasant conditions to live with – even if the prize for them, as Osborne might want us to think, is a life spent relying on benefits.

Kate’s bones – particularly in her upper arms and shoulders – dislocate several times a day, dragging (and tearing) her chest and back muscles with them. She walks with a stick and obvious difficultly. She can’t stand, or sit, for long spells, because those resting states put pressure on her joints and make her bones pop out of their sockets. Her hands and fingers are compromised, which lends even small human moments a perverted frisson: she is delighted when her post arrives, (“I was right! I’ve got a parcel!”) but then she struggles to open it. Her hands don’t function well in the cold and her finger joints dislocate along with the rest.

To cap all this off, she is in constant pain and takes daily hits of morphine to manage it. “It depends on whether I’m in a flare or not – on a daily basis, it is 40mg, but on a bad day, it is 80mg. I have a very high tolerance for it [the morphine] – it doesn’t put me to sleep or anything. What my doctor is worried about is there won’t be anything else [to treat the pain in the future], because of my age and how tolerant I already am.”

She collects a disability living allowance and some housing benefit. Her disposable income (spent mostly on heating and utilities) comes to about £275 a month. She’d love to get a job and make a better income (she wants to be a librarian, while we’ve still got libraries), but that is (literally) out of reach unless doctors can stabilise the pain and dislocations. The upshot is that she’s housebound much of the time. There are trips to church and choir, some outings with friends and an online life, but these all must fit round the illness, exhaustion and morphine.

Life at home all day isn’t the picnic Osborne thinks, either. Kate’s adapted ground-floor council flat (she waited two years to get it – “you wouldn’t believe how hard it is to find an adapted flat in the private rental sector”) is barely habitable some of the time. She keeps the flat as neat someone with such limited movement can, but there are problems that she can hardly be expected to address.

There’s no lino or floor covering in the kitchen, for example – the rough surface looks like a dirt floor when you first see it – and the tiles round the flat are peeling. There are gaps at either end of the front door that daylight pours through. Last week (during the first cold snap), the door gave up entirely and fell from its hinges. The cold rushed in as the heat rushed out – “it was minus five that day” – and Kate had to wait about six hours for maintenance to fix it. She doubts that the floor or door problems will be properly addressed, because her estate is due to be knocked down and rebuilt – if, as we both observe, there’s enough staff and funding to do that. Standing in this flat, it’s hard not to feel that the only way is up. Pity we’re about to head down.