I spoke to the Guardian about the growing funding crisis in local government
Article originally published in the Guardian on Sunday 5th February 2017.
‘The government is being accused of trying to bypass parliament with legislation giving the communities secretary executive power to allocate local government funding for services without a vote in the Commons.
The move would make councils, rather than the government, directly accountable for a £5.8bn shortfall that threatens to plunge social-care services into total crisis.
The local government finance bill, currently in committee stage in the Commons, abolishes the annual local government finance settlement, which is approved by parliament every year. The Department for Communities and Local Government says the change would ensure councils are more self-sufficient and accountable for funding services with business rates, 100% of which will be retained by authorities to spend on newly devolved responsibilities, such as public health, by 2020.
But Labour MP Jim McMahon, the shadow local government minister, said he believed the changes were an attempt by the government to avoid scrutiny of funding shortfalls and to make councils take ownership of unpopular cuts to services such as the crisis-stricken social-care system.“They know there is no new money, and want as little scrutiny of that fact as possible, and they also know that even a 25% increase in the amount of authority funding that comes from council tax won’t be able to pay for that. I suspect we’ll see some really whopping council tax increases coming by the end of this parliament.”
The Local Government Association estimates councils will face an overall funding shortfall of £5.8bn by 2020, £2.6bn of which is specifically related to social-care services.
McMahon, a former leader of Oldham Borough Council, said the public would face “a council-tax bombshell” in 2020, by which time the government projects that the total amount of local authority funding raised by council tax will have increased by 25% – equivalent to each council increasing council tax and the social-care precept by the maximum allowed every year.
“The cruelty is that the government refuses to take ownership of the problem,” he said. “You’re asking people to pay more council tax than they’ve ever done before with absolutely no consideration of their ability to pay at a time when the universal services they think they’re paying council tax for are being snatched away.”
The Conservative-run council in Surrey, the county where the chancellor, Philip Hammond, and the health secretary, Jeremy Hunt, are MPs, will hold a referendum in May on a 15% council-tax increase to pay for social care and children’s services in May, with other councils in the south-east said to be following developments closely.’
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