Enough. The gradual decline of our local safety net, punctuated by bursts of councils imploding, must stop.
Local government needs a long-term plan for recovery, reset and renewal. Plugging funding gaps might enable the system to limp on, but it is fundamentally broken.
To begin recovery local government funding could immediately be stabilised. Multi-year funding settlements would give certainty for councils to plan around. Identifying all competitive funding pots and merging them into single capital allocations would put an end to capacity-draining bidding rounds and enable local areas to get on with priorities.
Resetting funding of our local civic layer requires a firm grip of the costs that have been created by its deterioration. Current spending plans beyond 2025 imply deeper cuts for ‘unprotected’ budgets, including local government, despite the knock-on impact of council underfunding: reduced social care causes hospital pressures and lack of social housing leads to rocketing temporary accommodation costs.
Whether or not future growth enables overall spending to rise, Treasury calculations should recognise the value of the local safety net as foundational for all other services to function effectively and less reactively. The long postponed fair funding review has proved impossible: removing local government funding allocations from political control should now be considered. An objective assessment of demand pressures and resource sufficiency is required.
For renewal, we need to move towards devolving a wider range of fiscal powers which would retain a proportion of national tax revenues locally with equalisation across the system. Confirming the constitutional independence of local government and a wider shift towards place-based budgets across other public services, would all contribute long-term to more resilient, outcomes-focused local systems more responsive to the needs of communities – and more sustainable for the future.
Jessica Studdert is deputy chief executive of New Local
