Local difficulty

It’s always happening with Cities Minister Greg Clark warning of serious consequences for Yorkshire, in terms of future funding, if voters in Leeds, Sheffield, Bradford and Wakefield reject plans to introduce directly-elected mayors.

The latest threat comes from Eric Pickles, the Communities and Local Government Secretary, who is bemused that the City of York Council should choose to increase its council tax levy by 2.9 per cent at a time when household budgets are under strain rather than accept a government grant to offset this rise.

There is a simple reason for this. The authority believes the best way of safeguarding services in the long-term is by pushing through a modest rise now rather than accepting a one-off grant that may mean even deeper cuts in future years.

It remains to be seen who is right – the Labour-led council or Mr Pickles. That will be for the voters of York to decide in 2015 when the next town hall elections are held, and the Minister should accept this rather than tell Parliament: “This council is going to find itself in a very difficult position.”

It does not matter whether this was a throwaway comment or not; there needs to be a far more constructive dialogue between Ministers and local authorities on the need for greater consistency in the Government’s grant allocation process.

This, after all, is the source of the majority of local authority funding. And it leads on to this final point: can a localism ever be delivered when Whitehall controls the purse-strings, enabling Ministers to make veiled threats in the hope of getting their own way? On current evidence, the answer is in the negative.