Elliot Keck: Councils are spending more and more on taking children to school in taxis

In May 2025, the Spectator ran undoubtedly one of the most attention-grabbing front covers of 2025: Scuzz Nation. As the author of the piece, wrote, summarising the concept:

“Scuzz Nation looks very much like the country of a few years ago, only worse. It’s a place where decay happens faster than repair, where crime largely goes unpunished and where the social fabric has been slashed, graffitied and left by the side of the road.”

Many a head has been scratched over why exactly it is that Britain, from big city to small village, feels like it’s getting that little bit worse. It goes beyond the age-old complaints about declining local high streets. It includes deteriorating social norms and a pervasive low-level sense of lawlessness.

Such a broad phenomenon will have many causes. But for the reason why the local high street hasn’t been powerwashed for months, why the graffiti still hasn’t been cleaned off the local community centre, why the pothole on your street hasn’t been filled, and why the flower-bed in your local roundabout has rotted, the explanation is actually quite simple. It’s because increasingly councils really are cash-strapped. And it’s not just down to waste and inefficiency. Westminster is to blame.

Since the early 2010s, central government has been steadily delegating responsibility for delivering social care and children’s services to local government. Responsibility, not power or autonomy. It is not for town halls to decide how to allocate resources to these services as it sees fit. You’ve been told to look after your friend’s children for the weekend, but it’s not up to you what to feed them or even how to fill their time.

Only it’s worse than that. Once they’ve been dropped off, you get a flurry of texts. You need to give them dessert, purchase a specific film for them, order a takeaway. Reimbursement is promised, but when it comes it isn’t quite enough.

Because with both SEND and social care, these responsibilities have expanded significantly over time, yet central government funding has not kept pace with rising demand. In both areas, demand is soaring, yet councils have a legal obligation to meet this demand with no cost limit attached. In the case of social care, politicians can at least try and blame demography for this. With SEND and children’s services, it’s the policy that is to blame.

The recent surge in SEND spending is the area where the central government’s role has been most direct, because of national policy changes. This began with the Children and Families Act 2014, which replaced ‘statements of special educational needs’ with ‘education, health and care plans’ (EHCPs). This act increased the age limit for SEND support, from 19 to 25, broadened the range of support to which EHCP holders are entitled and made that entitlement legally enforceable. These reforms increased demand at the same time as they constrained local discretion to manage their budgets.

That has created what can only be described as hockey stick increases in expenditure on SEND services. The most perpendicular can be found in SEN transport, with councils increasingly being obliged to fork out sometimes hundreds of pounds per day for one eligible child to be taxied back and forth to school. The resources of the parents are irrelevant – they could have half a dozen cars on their driveway, including a motability one provided for the purpose of transporting said child. Isle of Wight Council’s spending has tripled from £670,000 to just shy of £2 million in just two years. Kent is spending £70 million, up from £28 million in 2020-21.

This is all the consequence of what is a truly horrifying increase in disabilities, in particular autism, for, in particular, young children aged 4-10. In Islington, a full nine per cent of children aged 4-10 have autism, up from one per cent in 2015-16. More than half of these children have EHCPs, which entitle them to a range of additional support, including transportation. The sceptical reader may raise an eyebrow at the scale of these increases. But the council officer in charge of this area has almost no latitude to query it. Check out the figures for your area in our local authority dashboard.

The consequence, as our research has recently demonstrated, is that almost half of council budgets now goes on social care and children’s services, up from 30 per cent a decade ago. That forces councils to cut back on beautification projects and basic maintenance – potholes, power washing, flowers, lawn mowing and so on. And indeed when we sent FOIs to a sample of councils, we found cuts in real terms of 16 per cent in these areas over the last few years.

Solving this problem, and allowing councils to actually use their budgets for the things taxpayers expect may not lead to the replacement of the Kurdish barber with an artisan baker, or the American candy store with a vintage bookshop, but at least the pavement outside might have been cleaned in the last few months. That would be something.