Complexities of grant system cost councils millions of pounds
One of the biggest frustrations for Calderdale – and every other council - is how more and more central government money is channelled through a myriad of separate grant funds.
Usually, this involves submitting competitive bids, setting councils against each other, while trying to secondguess the rules that will decide the winners and losers.
Sometimes, as with the recent round of the Levelling Up Fund, it appears that the rules are changed after bids have been submitted - wasting even more time and money.
It’s estimated that £27 million was spent by councils across England bidding for the most recent funding round - and it would seem that for many of us, it was a pointless exercise as a random change in the rules meant our bids were not given serious consideration.
The Local Government Association estimates that the average cost to each council in pursuing a competitive grant bid is around £30,000.
So councils end up spending hundreds of thousands - possibly millions - of pounds each year chasing down various pots of money across Whitehall.
Incidentally, this inefficient and complex funding system is not just a problem for local government.
Take skills and training – a critical area for our future wellbeing, if our country wants to improve our disappointingly low rate of economic growth.
Across England £20 billion is spent on at least 49 nationally contracted or delivered employment and skills related schemes or services, managed by nine Whitehall departments and agencies, and delivered by multiple providers.
This is largely a result of our over-centralised and bureaucratic system of national government. It has been increasingly made more political under recent Conservative governments, who seem to use these grants to create photo opportunities for ministers and Conservative MPs.
This comes at the expense of transparent and effective decision making.
How much more effective would it be if central government simply got out of the way, allocating each local area adequate funding based on a fair understanding of relative needs, with decisions for local communities taken by their locally elected representatives?