Across the UK, local government is under immense financial pressure. Many local authorities have had to strip services right back or sell local assets to help continue to make ends meet long before any Section 114 notices, which means effective bankruptcy, were issued.
Our latest research based on new analysis of published local government data alongside statistics from a Freedom of Information request shows that an estimated 75,000 council assets, worth around £15 billion, have been sold by local authorities in England since 2010. That’s an average of more than 6,000 council assets worth around £1.2 billion being sold annually every year during the last 13 years.
Under-pressure local authorities often have little choice but to sell. Councils like Birmingham, who’s financial plight has recently been well documented, will likely to be forced to sell more ‘local crown jewels’ to make their books balance. This loss of assets has been experienced in places across the country but has been particularly hard felt in many urban authority areas.
People have lost far too much over the last 13 years. Meanwhile, central government has failed to invest in our communities and has watered down major regional infrastructure projects. Our economy and democracy are not yet designed to help all places thrive. Addressing this loss of social infrastructure and reducing regional inequality, or levelling up, remains imperative for both improving the fairness of society and the efficiency of our economy.
In our latest report, ‘Parallel Lives’, we spoke to local communities in Hastings, Redcar, and Stoke-on-Trent to understand how they feel about their places and to hear their views on levelling up. We found that people feel a profound sense of loss. Many spoke of former greatness and a proud history but of contemporary decline, decay and abandonment. Yet, there was cause for optimism too. Many people we spoke to were proud of the places they call home, they felt compelled to patch up the holes in a threadbare social safety net, and some were hopeful and optimistic that positive change could come. The stories told in these three places will resonate in towns and cities across the UK.
Debate on levelling up has tended to focus on polling through to more abstract (as far as citizens are concerned) discussion about the UK’s productivity puzzle. While we drew on this work and analysis on regional inequalities, we felt that foregrounding the perspectives and voices of citizens was key to reenergising policy thinking on levelling up. Based on these conversations we set out a citizen’s blueprint for regionally rebalancing wealth, power and opportunity across the country.
Crucially, we need to see central government adopt a new, fairer funding formula for major public sector investment projects so that areas that need investment receive it. To help protect communities from continual losses of assets and key local social infrastructure, we need to introduce common good property registers to increase transparency of public asset ownership. Alongside this, there must be greater support for communities to regain assets. And we need to think differently and creatively to properly empower citizens locally. This includes allocating one per cent of local funding to ‘participatory budgeting’ so that citizens can get directly involved in the decisions made about their area.
Turning the tide on this sense of loss and regionally rebalancing the country remains a central challenge for the next government. From our citizen conversations, it’s clear that communities are still too painfully aware that our economy and democracy often do not work for them and their places. People want, expect and deserve change.
Ryan Swift is a research fellow at IPPR North
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