To Newcastle, then, where chaos (to borrow the Standard’s favourite word) reigns over those who have any sort of relationship with Newcastle council. The council has not released detailed proposals for cuts yet, and people are finding the suspense unpleasant. Either the council is dithering, or it is playing one of the all-time long games with the government, as we shall see:

Tucked into a two-desk office in the converted Holy Jesus hospital in central Newcastle is Launchpad, a voluntary sector group for people who use mental health services.

Launchpad runs focus groups, does outreach work, produces a service users’ guide to day services and assists a wide variety of local self-help groups.

Launchpad is an open-access service, which means that anyone can use it. All sorts of people stop by: people with schizophrenia, depression, anxiety, personality disorders, and the drug and alcohol-related problems that sometimes accompany mental illness.

The lives led by Launchpad’s clientele are not especially enviable: I’d like to see George Osborne banging on about “lifestyle choice” in here.

I speak to Jim Davison, a once-homeless, recovering alcoholic who is heavily medicated for psychosis. He says he wandered the streets of Edinburgh pissed for three years before he finally gave up the drink and got help finding proper accommodation. He volunteers at Launchpad several days a week now. He is laudably snarky about the miles and prescriptions he’s clocked up over the years. He says that he takes “loads of medication, including antipsychotics. I take Diazepam, nearly the whole Benzo family…I have auditory hallucinations – except they’re not hallucinations,” he smiles. “They’re real.” It’s an oldie and it’s a goodie. Everyone in the office laughs at it.

Which is fair enough. There isn’t much else to laugh about in this sector at the moment. Nobody knows the full extent of the cuts that Liberal Democrat Newcastle council will pursue, and they’re finding the waiting and guesswork difficult. Rumours rush along the grapevine, almost before your eyes. Phones ring and emails race along PC screens. The moment I walk in the door, Launchpad’s fulltime staff member, Alisdair Cameron, tells me that a representative from another voluntary group (a woman who was supposed to meet us) had to run to an emergency meeting with a regional commissioner to try and source funds.

There’s a partial list of cuts, but critics say it doesn’t account for the £50m in savings the council is expected to make. The council is trying to shift press and public focus to its plans to lobby the government for an improved grant settlement.

The government’s plans to scrap the working neighbourhood fund grant – a substantial grant that is paid to the poorest areas – makes Newcastle’s prospects (and Newcastle Lib Dem prospects) even less likely. The council estimates that the reduction in spending power in Newcastle is about £98 per person – compared with a national average of £49. Those sorts of numbers won’t come out well for anyone. Service providers know they’ll be hit – they just don’t know when. Interestingly, Northumberland council, which is also Lib Dem, is playing a similar game. Labour is after both councils to come clean about cuts. With local elections just months away and Newcastle Lib Dems on the fasttrack to a hiding from Newcastle students, things are brutal and fraught.

Unions argue that the council is already backtracking on promises to negotiate on redundancies and losses (this is a story that I’ve heard around the country – with thousands of people to jettison and thousands of redundancy payments to make, councils are doing as much as they can on the sly and the cheap).

Alisdair Cameron is concerned about Launchpad’s future, but isn’t sure when or where to direct his concerns. Launchpad costs just £52,000 to run each year (that covers Cameron’s salary, a part-timer’s salary, the rent, the phone connection and that sort of thing). Two-thirds of the funding comes from the local primary care trust (nobody seems to know whether that money belongs in the ringfenced funds that Pickles plans to shift from PCTs to councils) and a third from the council.

Cameron thinks the PCT money should be safe for another year – “we’re relatively small fry and the PCT commission has been pretty good to us” – but says bets are off for the council’s contribution. He says that he can’t imagine how Newcastle will look when the Tories have finished with it. Iain Duncan Smith’s plans for a single welfare benefit, the abolishing of incapacity benefit, Pickles’ clunking fist crashing down on councils – “they can’t do it.” He talks about shantytowns and homelessness.

So does Jim Davison. He knows about shantytowns and homelessness – he lived on the streets for years in Edinburgh, when he was drinking.

“I’ve seen a few plots of Steven Spielberg,” he says, nodding knowingly. I think he means that he knows a thing or two about crappy dramas. He’s on housing benefit and income support, too, so he may well see a few more.

More to come.