David Taylor: Local government is trying to do too much

Cllr David Taylor is Chairman of the Places Overview & Scrutiny Sub-Committee on Havering Council

We’re rapidly approaching the much-anticipated Local Government Spending Review and, like clockwork, councils and councillors across the country are making the case for greater funding for local authorities.

The financial collapse of local authorities is as certain as Labour’s tax rises, with 30 councils approved for a Capitalisation Directive (loan) for 2025/26, meaning that they are borrowing millions just to deliver the statutory services that are required of them.

In my own local authority, Havering in East London, we recently got permission to borrow £88m. That is on top of around £50m last year and it’s coming with a four to five per cent interest rate and will take decades to pay off. For context, Havering spends around £200m a year, so we’re rapidly closing in on borrowing half our budget just to balance the books each year.

This situation has been on the horizon for some time. Havering used to receive a government grant of around £70m a year in 2010 and this was reduced down to less than £2m this year. At the same time, local authorities are being asked to do more and more, slowly evolving into mini-Whitehalls. In fact, 80 per cent of Havering’s most recent budget goes just on meeting the statutory duties of adult health and social care; the borough is essentially a care provider, which also collects bins.

I’m not going to argue that we don’t need a better funding formula, but I’ve not yet come across a single councillor calling for local authorities to do less. As a Conservative, with small government written through my core, I think we need to focus on what we ask councils to do before we rip more money out of taxpayers’ hands and pass it to town-halls.

With health and social care taking up so much of Havering’s budget, I decided to dive into some of the spending that goes on.

£85,000 a year is going to be spent on a ‘Tier 2 weight management service’. Described as ‘one part of an effective whole systems approach’, the decision paper for this spend outlines that Havering Council has a ‘responsibility to improve the health and wellbeing and reduce inequalities for residents under the Health and Social Care Act 2012’. The weight management service will be provided by gym operator Everyone Active and include ‘WhatsApp groups for classes’ and ‘private weighing once a week’.

OK, so tackling obesity is good, but why is this suddenly the duty of a local authority?

It’s not just obesity programmes. There’s £151,000 a year for a Stop Smoking Service, £117,000 a year for a Healthwatch programme to act as a ‘consumer champion for users of health and social care services’. And these are just a few examples.

The money really begins to rack up when one takes a look at the spend on special education needs services, vulnerable adults provision, and so on.

All of these services are fantastic, but we need to start asking a) what are the ‘nice to haves’ and what are the ‘need to haves’, and b) why are local authorities delivering these services?

We already have a national health service, and we pay into that via our National Insurance. Part of the benefit of a national health provider is buying power, the ability to purchase a service for universal coverage and at much lower rates. Purchase a ‘stop smoking service’ for the whole of the UK and you’re going to hit a better spend per person than if you purchase one just for Havering. That’s if we ignore the question of why it’s the government’s job to run a stop smoking service or weight management programme in the first place.

I think our town halls have become bloated and inefficient, whilst as the same time stretched too thin. Staff at Havering are seeing an explosion in levels of sickness, a collapse in funding from government, and a demand that they spend their time trying to find someone to help us stand on a pair of scales once a week.

Something has to change.

A radical Conservative agenda for our town halls, as well as the country as a whole, needs to be one of rolling back the parental state and the removal of health care provision from our town halls.

A friend from Singapore, who has recently arrived in the UK, remarked that people in this country always seem to think that their problems are someone else’s fault. He’s correct, Blair’s dismantling of community, in favour of a parental super-state, has left Brits asking “what are the government going to do about it?” for just about everything. It is now the government’s and local government’s duty to help you drop those extra pounds and put down your cigarettes. It’s justified with examples of how much obesity and smoking costs the NHS each year.

That’s not a bad argument, except that it means the masses need to pay for someone else’s lifestyle choices and the impact that they have on the NHS. Whilst we’ve cheered a freeze on certain ‘sin taxes’, we’ve seen the government simply claw back the money from elsewhere.

Local councillors know that their cries for increased local government funding are going to go unanswered. There isn’t the money available. In Havering, we are all sitting and waiting for the finance officer to call ‘time’ on the situation and declare bankruptcy, as our debt grows exponentially.

If we can get local authorities back to being focused on what they should be, such as bins, roads, and parks, then we will also be able to properly hold councillors to account for their spending decisions. Havering spending 80 per cent of its budget on health and social care means that as much as 80 per cent of local spending is beyond criticism. It has to be done, so says various Acts of Parliament.

If Havering is driven to bankruptcy then councillors will simply blame government and the statutory demands. Residents objections to yet higher tax rises will be met with declarations of ‘We had no choice”.

It’s time for a radical Conservative agenda for local government. Next time we are in power, nationally, we need to dismantle the parental-superstate and reintroduce personal responsibility. We need to scale back the demands on town-halls, increasing the ability for councillors to really be held to account on the decisions they make.

When we do that we can start to roll back council tax rises, one of the more regressive taxes, and begin to focus on sorting out the miles of potholes, littered parks, and over-priced parking.

Our residents will thank us.