On a sunny lawn, surrounded by the well-heeled pensioners of Tunbridge Wells, Rishi Sunak told us all something we already knew - that Levelling Up was always a con.
The former Chancellor told the gathered audience: "I managed to start changing the funding formulas, to make sure that areas like this are getting the funding that they deserve, because we inherited a bunch of formulas that shoved all the funding into deprived urban areas, that needed to be undone and I started the work of undoing that."
Even if you take into account the increasingly desperate and unwieldy nature of his faltering leadership campaign, it was a remarkable moment of pure mask-slipping honesty, but it wasn't exactly news to those of us who live in the areas he was so happy to boast about diverting funding away from.
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One of the main issues with Sunak's shameless claims is that he most certainly wasn't the first person to begin this scandalous pork-barrel practice of pushing funds away from those who need it most.
It was in the early days of the coalition government in 2010 that this country saw a fundamental change in the way funding was allocated to local councils across the country. Prior to 2010, councils were largely funded through central government grants, with a formula based on which areas had the highest need or to put it in Mr Sunak's words 'a bunch of formulas that shoved all the funding into deprived urban areas'.
When the coalition government began its austerity agenda, its eyes quickly became trained on local government budgets and the process of huge cuts to those crucial grants began. Statistics from the Unison union show that in the decade from 2010 to 2020, grant funding for councils in England was reduced by a difficult-to-comprehend £16 billion. In Liverpool, £450m has been cut back in that period, roughly 65% of all the council's funding. A Centre for Cities report showed that a deprived city like Liverpool has lost around £816 for each resident every year.
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Stuart Wilks-Heeg is a professor of politics at the University of Liverpool, he explained: "Local government in England took the greatest hit of all areas of public service as a result of austerity. The cuts in central government grants to local councils in England were enormous, particularly from 2010-2015, far bigger than any of the reductions during the Thatcher years.
"The impact of these cuts has been very uneven, however. Councils in areas hit by economic decline in the 1970s and 1980s were far more reliant on government grants than those in areas where local economies had been buoyant. In areas that have experienced relative economic decline, and where social deprivation tends to be greater, council spending fell the most over the past decade."
The slashing of these grants left a huge black hole in the coffers of town halls across the country, particularly those that relied on them the most. In their place, the Cameron government introduced a fundamentally flawed and unfair system that would continue to widen the already gaping chasm between areas of deprivation and affluence.
The new system would see councils able to increase the amount of Council Tax they could charge from their local residents in order to fund services, this has included a specific amount that can be used to fund the growing crisis in social care. But there is a huge problem with this - it's totally unfair.
This system means that instead of councils being assessed in terms of what the specific needs are of the communities they serve and funded accordingly, they have been left to charge increasing amounts of Council Tax on widely different housing bases.
A city like Liverpool, with really high levels of deprivation and need, will require more services and support to be funded than a more affluent borough. But Liverpool has a higher amount of cheaper properties in Band A or B, so actually cannot raise as much money for those services as can be raised by the more affluent areas, which are collecting tax on those bigger homes. Do you see the problem here?
The impact of the cuts on communities has been huge. Professor Wilks-Heeg explained: "The impact of a decade of local government cuts will be visible to almost everyone. It can be seen in boarded-up libraries and youth centres, poorly-maintained roads and pavements, and unrepaired children’s play equipment in parks. All the research confirms those impressions. Around a third of public libraries have closed. Thousands of youth centres and bus routes have been axed. The research also tells us that deprived areas have been disproportionately affected by the removal of these facilities.
"Councils have been forced to focus provision on those in greatest need and on areas where they have clearly defined statutory responsibilities. Council spending on housing has been cut almost everywhere in the country, and what’s left of it has been channelled to a much greater extent on provision for the homeless.
"Local spending on public transport has also generally been slashed, with councils protecting spending on concessionary passes. The short-term rationale for making these decisions is obvious. But, in the long-term, the problem is clear. What use is a concessionary bus pass if there is no bus route serving your neighbourhood?"
As well as Council Tax, increasingly desperate town halls were encouraged to be more entrepreneurial and bring in more revenue funding through business rates to make up for the millions they had lost in cuts. Part of this saw town halls borrow huge sums from the government's Public Works Loan Board to fund property investments.
As Proffessor Wilks-Heeg points out, this highly risky and problematic system was also weighted against poorer areas. He said: "Despite the scale of this activity, the revenue generated has done little to make up for the loss of government grants. The scope to undertake such activity is also far greater in affluent areas and large cities than it is in declining coastal areas or post-industrial towns.
"In some cases, councils have entered into commercially risky ventures. Warrington Borough Council bought a 50% stake in an energy provider that subsequently went bust. Sefton Metropolitan Council bought the New Strand shopping centre in Bootle, only to see its value halve in 5 years. The current period of economic turbulence that began with Covid could have profound impacts where councils have borrowed significantly to fund such ventures."
Local councils should not be run like businesses, they are there to supply and manage services for people in the communities across the country. It was inevitable that this approach would be rife with problems as it has proven to be.
Looking back on the past 12 years and it's clear that communities have been fundamentally altered and stripped from what they were before this assault began. And its widely accepted that any claims around so-called 'Levelling Up' have done little to address this. A big part of this is because it is once again seen as an unfair process, with areas forced to bid in to central government pots to try and win cash for projects - rather than have money allocated based on need.
Professor Wilks-Heeg said: "The current government seems to be stuck in an endless cycle of inventing new policies that seek to reverse the problems caused by its previous policies. Levelling-up is one of the key examples of this tendency, but there are several reasons it’s doomed to fail.
"First of all, the £4.8 billion Levelling Up Fund is simply not sufficient to reverse the impact of more than a decade of local government cuts. In truth, it’s not even enough to make up for the loss of EU regional funds after Brexit – a programme which had such an enormously positive impact on Merseyside and elsewhere in the north of England.
"Secondly, there’s no guarantee that Levelling Up funds will reach the places where they are most needed. Because of the nature of the competitive bidding process that is used to allocate funds, only 38% of the most deprived areas secured resources in the first round of allocations. This is partly down to how decisions are made in government about which bids to back, but it is also down to some councils concluding the game is not worth the candle and simply not submitting bids."
Any so-called Levelling Up agenda has never done anything to address the huge damage that has been done to deprived communities over the past 12 years and the current leadership candidates have made no mention of this either. While Rishi Sunak's words in Tunbridge Wells are stark to hear out in the open, it is clear that his mission to divert funds away from places that needed them most was simply a continuation of a practice well established by his party years earlier.
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