Central government must let local authorities make spending decisions as council tax rises - Andy Brown

For decades both political parties have steadily stripped away the decision-making powers of our local authorities and asked them to deliver their services with less money. Now they are facing another round of real term funding cuts and everywhere you look there are worried officials telling us that they simply don’t know how they can set a sustainable budget.

In Leeds they are having to make £69.8m of cuts. In Bradford they have a £28.4m shortfall that can only be met by using strictly limited reserves. Kirklees has reported a £30m overspend. Things aren’t much easier in North Yorkshire where the new council is currently expecting to make the equivalent of a £30m operating loss next year.

Many of the price rises that the rest of us are suffering from are hitting the services that local governments run every bit as drastically as they are punishing ordinary people and private businesses. It takes a lot of energy to heat a swimming pool. Feeding the occupants of a care home costs a lot more when food inflation is running at 13.3 per cent a year. Driving a gritting lorry uses a lot of petrol.

On top of that most councils are finding that a shortage of labour is hitting them in the pocket. If it isn’t possible to find enough people willing to work at minimum wage doing the highly responsible job of caring for others, then councils are still obliged to provide a service. Often their legal obligations can only be met by hiring expensive agency staff. If bin lorry drivers start to leave because they can get paid a lot more driving a truck it isn’t possible to keep providing a service without raising their wages.

One year of cuts can perhaps be covered by efficiency savings and by getting rid of spending on things that aren’t really essential. Decades of decline result in the service simply not being of the standard that it used to be.

If a child in your family has difficulties at school then expect a long wait to get a professional assessment of their needs and an even longer wait for those needs to be met. When a hospital seeks to discharge a patient who needs looking after at home it is likely to find it can’t do so because there aren’t enough care staff willing to look after that person for insultingly low wages.

It wasn’t always like this. Look across Yorkshire and you will find a whole series of magnificent local government buildings put up by communities that were proud of their local area.

Look at a council office put up towards the end of the 20th century and it won’t be remotely as impressive. It is likely to reek of neglect. The decline of local government has been going on for a long time. Which may be one reason why there is a decline in trust in politicians and a feeling that they are remote and don’t understand our problems.

Having a local councillor who is known in the local community and can be easily contacted by people that they have lived alongside for decades is something of real value. Listening to remote politicians running consultation exercises on devolution whilst powers are stripped away from those who understand the needs of the local community isn’t. It is an excellent way to increase cynicism.

Decades of neglect of local government cannot be solved overnight. It has taken generations to take us from a network of strong local decision makers who were rooted in their local communities to a confused mess of different local structures struggling to run services under near impossible pressures.

Yet if central government really does want to try and level up there is one small thing that it could do very quickly. Over recent years it has top-sliced huge amounts of money that used to go directly to local authorities to enable them to make decisions about things like the top priorities for local economic development. It has pocketed much of that money but still uses significant amounts of it to launch competitions in which local authorities have to spend a lot of time and energy bidding against each other to try and get funding back into their area.

This enables central government to allocate funds to its political friends and to marginal constituencies and to make highly publicised announcements about how generous it has been to local communities. It leaves local authorities unable to plan for the future with any certainty and wastes money on preparing bids for schemes that get turned down if they are politically unwelcome.

In a time of such serious shortages of cash, central government could make life a lot easier if it simplified things and allocated any money it could spare fairly and equally to each area and let the local people get on with making decisions about the most important local needs.

Andy Brown is a Craven District Councillor representing Aire Valley with Lothersdale and the Green Party North Yorkshire Councillor for Aire Valley.