article: On market days, stalls cover the square of my local town in front of the old abbey and the car parks are full. Wander through the tight streets and it's hard to see that anything is different - it looks and feels the same as it always has - but a silent revolution is under way. Since 2010, national spending on local government has halved and all of our communities are having to make do with less. In Selby, the police cells and magistrates court have been closed, CCTV and bus services have been cut back, street wardens have been axed and many of the street lights turn off at midnight. And a voluntary army is at work. On the outskirts of the town, Terry Heselton manages a team of volunteers who run Barlby library - which would have closed without their efforts. "Most people would prefer it if the council could carry on providing the library service, but in the real world that's simply not going to happen," he says. Nationally, the number of library volunteers has almost doubled since 2010. It is a new model of civic provision and it brings savings, but Terry says he had doubts. "Your initial reaction as a group of volunteers is 'we're taking people's jobs, aren't we?' And I'm sure there are some people who still think that, but at the end of the day, I think we now know year-on-year, there's increasing cuts. We're never going to go back to running things the way they used to be." North Yorkshire County Council funds many of the services in Selby, but its spending power is shrinking by a third. The council has already saved £116m and it says it has done what it can to protect frontline services, with 60% of the savings found in the back office and more than 100 managers leaving. Gary Fielding has to make the figures work. He says the first cuts were genuine efficiency improvements, but it's got harder. "You go for the low-hanging fruit, you then grasp for the medium-height fruit and we're now getting the stepladders out and really climbing up that tree," he says. "We will always provide essential services to the most vulnerable, but change has got to happen - even on frontline services." Eighty-year-old Jean Collins volunteers in the Age UK Selby District offices in the town centre. The council used to pay for workers at the charity to visit isolated elderly people in their homes as part of a befriending scheme, but funding has now been redistributed to other Age UK organisations in Yorkshire and other befriending services in the town. The charity can now only afford to pay for a phone line in the office. One person affected by the changes is 87-year-old Betty McIntyre, who lives on her own in the village of Brayton, just outside Selby. She had a fall last year and has been confined to a chair in her living room for seven months. In one recent call, she told Jean: "I've been crying my eyes out
summary: Selby is a tidy market town sitting in the flat, open countryside south of York.