Two years ago this week, Michael Gove unveiled plans for an improbable-sounding “Medici model” to rejuvenate Britain’s cities and towns. Among other pledges, the government’s levelling up white paper promised to improve public services, restore a sense of local pride and belonging, and empower local leaders. An “array of interventions”, it was claimed, would create a virtuous cluster effect, echoing the formula of success in Italian city-states during the Renaissance.
Back in the real world, the secretary of state for levelling up, housing and communities has instead presided over what is now an existential funding crisis in local government. Many councils are barely able to carry out their statutory and growing responsibilities in adult and child social care, let alone engage in the kind of “discretionary” spending that enhances the life of their communities. Last week, facing a rebellion by Conservative MPs fearful of further cuts in an election year, Mr Gove made an extra £600m available to local authorities. Useful but nowhere near enough. Figures shared by the Institute for Government indicate that £7bn in extra cash would be required merely to return to the pre-austerity funding levels of 2010.
Data analysis by this newspaper has broken down what such a prolonged starving of resources means for the social fabric of places. Between 2010/11 and 2022/23, local spending per head on culture has dropped by almost half. Spending on roads and transport has plummeted by 40%, and on housing by a third. Libraries and youth clubs have closed, community buses have been curtailed, and parks have been neglected. Whitehall’s callous and reckless approach to the funding of services has hit hardest the poorer communities which rely on them most. Levelling up “pots” of money, handed out at the whim of Westminster, have abjectly failed to compensate for a financial squeeze that has broken the economic model of local government.
In this dire context, shallow talk about devolution and local empowerment is at best disingenuous. As we reported on Monday, the government’s funding estimate for local authorities next year – inadequate as it is – relies on the assumption that a maximum 4.99% increase in council tax will be imposed this spring. While Rishi Sunak and his chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, prepare the ground for their pre-election tax cuts, this is, to put it mildly, a little rich. Via a deeply regressive tax still based on 1991 property valuations, people are being asked to pay more for substantially less. That is bad for communities and bad for local democracy, as Mr Gove must surely know.
As the wealthiest Florentine of his time, Cosimo de’ Medici spent a fortune on the works that became the glory of Renaissance Florence. Successive Conservative governments, driven by a combination of ideology and cost-cutting opportunism, have launched councils on an unsustainable fiscal trajectory destined for some to end in municipal breakdown and bankruptcies. There are only so many one-off asset sales that can be made, and there is a limit to the extent services can be whittled down to the bone. The shadow communities secretary, Angela Rayner, has rightly judged Mr Gove’s £600m to be a short‑term “sticking plaster”, designed to pacify council leaders between now and the election. A new settlement is desperately needed, recognising the scale of the challenges councils face, and of the funding that will be required to meet them.
