This paper set out to study the effects of both demographic and economic decline on the provision of local authority services and to test several hypotheses. It has been seen that a simple relationship between demographic decline and the expected rundown of services does not exist even for those services which are directly related to size of population. This is because the structure of the diminishing population has changed, leading to a relative increase in the proportion of dependent age groups and of lower socio economic groups in city population, giving support to the hypothesis of selective outmigration. -from Author