When created in 2010 the New Homes Bonus was seen as a clever way of encouraging an acceleration in the building of new homes, something that was reported to be at its lowest level since the 1920s.
The logic remains powerful to this day.
At the same time the new coalition Government was embarking on its first round of cuts to the public finances - with the country around a trillion in debt and continuing to borrow billions of pounds each month.
With various government departments given measures of protection from these cuts, local government became very vulnerable – and those professionals at councils up and down the country know what has happened to our funding in the last five years.
Or do they?
Large parts of England remain two-tier – with county councils providing around 70 or 80 per cent of the services (including big ticket items such as highway maintenance, and services for vulnerable children and older adults needing care).
Yet when the detail of how the New Homes Bonus money was to be apportioned became clear, district councils learned they would receive 80 per cent of that money and counties receive only 20 per cent.
This lack of benefit for counties has been a large contributing factor to the position we find ourselves in Oxfordshire.
As the bulk of the funding to pay for the bonus is actually top-sliced from councils in proportion to their general grant, Oxfordshire CC is a seven-figure sum worse off each year than we would have been if the New Homes Bonus didn’t exist at all.
We at the county council are in the throes of making £290m of cuts from 2010 to 2018, with the strong potential for a lot more savings to be required on top of that.
Meanwhile, many district councils have had far more modest savings to make and, in some cases, have been in the enviable position of being able to set growth budgets.
At Oxfordshire CC and county councils throughout the country we have the additional pressures of rises in number of people being referred to both children’s and adult social care.
The pressure is such that we currently spend 50 per cent of our budget on two per cent of the population – those in receipt of care.
By 2020 we believe that without radical changes in what we provide, and how we provide it, this proportion would be 75 per cent of our budget, still on the most expensive few per cent of our population.
By that time we also believe that we will no longer be receiving any Revenue Support Grant from central government.
Clearly the new Government wants to keep cutting the deficit.
I don’t want to argue for or against that.
Neither do I wish to examine whether local government as a whole has suffered disproportionately from the cuts that have already taken place.
Those debates have been raging for many a year.
However, there is clearly something amiss when county councils have to cut vital services to the bone while district councils are under nothing like as much pressure.
Tackling the inequality of distribution with the New Homes Bonus is something that central government can do straight away to provide at least some ease from financial pressure for counties such as Oxfordshire.
We hope that plea will be heeded in Westminster.
Lorna Baxter is chief finance officer at Oxfordshire CC