According to one of the great 19th-century champions of municipal government, a well-run town was “a solemn organism through which should flow … all the highest, loftiest and truest ends of human nature.” Local leaders, argued the influential Birmingham preacher George Dawson, were charged with delivering beauty and dignity to all the members of a community, as well as order and health.
The vision of Dawson’s “civic gospel” is, of course, a world away from present realities. Hobbled by funding cuts since 2010, England’s 317 councils are paying the price of the failures of central government. Statutory obligations relating to adult and child social care and the homelessness crisis mean they are struggling to offer even the bare minimum to local electorates.
In a thoughtful paper published this week, the Demos thinktank charts the impact of this crisis in local government finances on the social fabric of cities and towns. Obliged to spend £2 in every £3 on rising care costs (and still falling short in terms of meeting soaring demand), councils are unable to invest in the public goods that allow places to flourish. A sustained cull of youth centres, libraries and other social spaces has impoverished community life, particularly for those who lack the private means to compensate. The result, conclude the paper’s authors, is a vicious cycle of social as well as economic decline.
Addressing this depressing legacy, the chancellor, Rachel Reeves, has performed some swift triage work, allocating in the budget a real-terms funding increase of £1.3bn next year. That may be enough to avert a feared spate of council bankruptcies. But it does not come close to making local authority finances in England sustainable, even in the short term.
After more than a decade of disgraceful neglect by Westminster – during which Tory governments made councils the fall guys of austerity – a much deeper reset is urgently required. Ms Reeves has indicated that the government intends to move to a fairer funding formula, taking into account differing levels of local need and revenue-raising capacity. After years of cuts that have fallen disproportionately on poorer parts of the country, such reform is long overdue. The government’s commitment to introduce multiyear financial settlements is also welcome, and will allow local leaders more certainty and the scope to plan for growth. “Trailblazer” funding settlements in the spring, confirmed in the budget, will give the Greater Manchester and West Midlands mayoral authorities greater budgetary freedom of manoeuvre.
All steps in the right direction. But local authorities must also be given the means to respond to the aspirations of the communities which elect them – whether via more generous grants or devolved fiscal powers, or a combination of both. The Conservative party’s centralised “levelling up” programme was a dismal affair, utterly compromised by the destruction that had been wreaked on council budgets. But that failure does not negate the importance of relocating power and money away from Westminster, and reviving civic pride and participation.
A thriving and empowered local politics is key to the national renewal that the government seeks. In getting there, Labour can channel the rising influence and confidence of its numerous metro mayors. But if municipal England is truly to make a comeback, it will need the resources to match its responsibilities.
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