Elliot Keck: Central Government keeps piling on extra burdens on councils – without extra funding

Two stories caught my eye recently, while I was thinking about the topic of my next column. One was the news that Jim McMahon, the minister for local government, is strongly considering sending in commissioners to run Croydon council due to fears that it is heading for effective bankruptcy for the fourth time. The other was a story that council leaders in England are warning that a deficit in SEND (special education needs and disabilities) budgets is pushing scores of councils to the fiscal precipice.

These should serve as reminders of the realities of life within local government. Notably that, so far, the councils that have seen their budgets implode to the point of a Section 114 notice have been catastrophically and chaotically run. But added to that, is another reality. Which is that when local authorities say they’re in trouble, they mean it and when it comes to who is to blame, the fault increasingly lies at the door of central government.

This situation has changed since the early days of the TPA, when local government was one of the most profligate and indulgent parts of the British state. Once upon a time, they did not even need to publish the remuneration details of highly-paid staff, meaning our annual town hall rich list had to be compiled using FOI laws. By 2015 they had built up an extraordinary retinue of 3,483 staff receiving over £100,000 and 537 receiving over £150,000. Research we released back in 2007 found that councils were spending an average of almost £1,000,000 on publicity alone, with expenditure almost doubling in real terms compared to ten years prior. That doesn’t even begin to cover some of the mad and egregious examples of waste – the rainbow crossings, award ceremonies and so on.

None of this has stopped, or not completely at least. Waste within local government is still a problem. Time and resources are frittered away on EDI initiatives, net-zero nonsense and beyond. Remote working has hammered productivity — South Cambridgeshire’s absurd plan to tackle poor performance by cutting hours by 20 per cent (with no loss of pay) rather than boosting dismal office attendance sums it up.

Yet it’s also true that local government has been crippled by three relentless assaults on their autonomy from Whitehall and Westminster. They are, in no particular order, the Care Act 2014, the Children and Families Act 2014, and the Equality Act 2010.

Take the first two, the Care Act and Children and Families Act. These pieces of legislation introduced a number of significant changes to the responsibilities of local authorities when it came to delivering social care and SEND services. The Children and Families Act expanded SEND provision to health and social care and extended the age range that SEND provisions would cover from 0-19 to 0-25. The Care Act, formalised the role of local authorities in providing social care by establishing a clear legal duty to provide care to eligible residents and created standardised rules which prevent town halls from restricting access to care through high local thresholds.

In both cases, statutory duties were enhanced, yet at the same time central government grants were being cut.

But an even more grotesque imposition on council finances by central government can be found in the Equality Act 2010, surely one of the most catastrophic pieces of legislation passed in recent decades. This tale has been told many times but, in short, a Supreme Court ruling in 2012 meant that Birmingham Council were deemed to have had a discriminatory policy going back years. According to the judges in the case, the work of binmen was equal in value to the work of, for example, cleaners and thus the higher pay received by the male-dominated former was, under the Equality Act, discriminatory compared to the pay of the female-dominated latter. Birmingham council weren’t able to afford to boost the pay of cleaners, so had to cut the pay of the binmen to equalise matters leading, arguably inevitably, to industrial action. They also had to pay hundreds of millions of pounds to settle these equal pay claims. And Birmingham is not the only one to face such a settlement.

Which makes Birmingham a watershed, not just in terms of the Equality Act itself but in terms of council bankruptcies. While previous cases in places such as Thurrock, Woking, Croydon and Nottingham had been clear cut examples of gross incompetence at best and fiscal malfeasance at worst, Birmingham looks different. It is certainly a poorly run council. But without that Supreme Court ruling it would likely still be solvent.

How long will it be until even genuinely well-run councils start to topple, given the pressures being imposed? Ultimately, regardless of all the well-documented problems with the way that local government is run, it’s increasingly the case that the lion’s share of the blame should be laid at the door of Whitehall and Westminster and their failures to find a national solution to what should be national issues.

If anything, though, this only further emphasises the need for councils to become more efficient, more streamlined, less wasteful. It has little influence and no power over the requirements imposed on it by Whitehall. Many of these excuses may be fair, but that will matter little to the taxpayer facing higher bills and worse services.