Birmingham finds itself in something more than a JAM...

a balanced budget. No deficits or credit card debt for them.

The similarity is that both households and councils are on the receiving end of several years of central government austerity cuts. So, as councils prepare to consult us on their 2017-18 draft budgets – and we prepare our outrage at the planned cuts in, for instance, the adult social care and homeless budgets reported in last week’s Post – it’s worth noting that the starting point for every major West Midlands council is at least twice the four per cent income loss of the harshest hit JAM households – and mostly several times the loss.

The biggest, Birmingham, is also proportionately the biggest sufferer, having today less than two-thirds of the £1.1 billion it had to spend on day-to-day services six years ago. Not so much JAM as JAMDO: Just About Managing? Dream On!

The figures quoted here are from an Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) monitoring of all English councils’ revenue spending – excluding education – over what should have been exciting transformational times for local finance.

England’s exceptionally centralised system of grant funding based on councils’ centrally assessed spending needs is being replaced by one in which councils will increasingly fund themselves. Instead of centrally pooling the business rates they collect, they will retain them and be incentivised to grow their local economies.

This generally welcome reform, however, has clashed with and been dominated by the Government’s = austerity drive of severe year-onyear grant cuts to all ‘unprotected’ public services, particularly the increasingly pressured children’s and adult services.

The outcome, calculates IFS, is that English councils collectively have seen an average real-terms funding cut of more than 25 per cent since 2009-10, with revenue from central government grants and redistributed business rates falling by 38 per cent.

Inevitably some services, the more discretionary ones – cultural, leisure, and environmental services, planning and development – have suffered greater than average cuts. Likewise, so have some councils – notably those serving the poorest communities that are consequently most grant-reliant.

Sutton Councillor Meirion Jenkins, in his Post letter (December 1), seemed to imply that Birmingham’s getting “more funding per head than almost any other local authority in the country” represented some kind of benevolent treatment.

It isn’t, of course. It’s simply central government’s assessment of local spending needs. As the 2014 Kerslake Report noted, the city overall is one of the country’s most economically and socially deprived authorities, with nearly a quarter of its neighbourhoods among the five per cent most deprived.

If the city council controlled more than about 31 per cent of its spending, was permitted to raise more of its own funding, and be less grant-dependent, the councillor’s grievance might have some validity. In present conditions, it doesn’t.

The West Midlands contains no absolute extremes, but some very marked disparities. Warwickshire and Worcestershire are the lowest grant-dependent councils, and each have had their funding cut by eight per cent. Less grant-dependent Shropshire and Staffordshire have seen cuts of 13 and 16 per cent.

Among the boroughs, Birmingham’s 34 per cent cut – understandably noted by Council leader John Clancy in his budget speech – stands out on its own. Sandwell, also with 70 per cent grant dependence, has had a 21 per cent cut, while Wolverhampton, Solihull, Coventry, Dudley and Walsall all start their budget-making with between 10 and 20 per cent less funding than in 2010.

As a former Chancellor liked to say, we are indeed all in this together, but some are a great deal deeper in than others. Chris Game is a lecturer at the Institute of Local Government Studies, at the University of

Birmingham

English councils collectively have seen an average real-terms funding cut of over 25 per cent since 2009-10