Disadvantaged people are suffering the most
ON May 2 we are to vote for local councillors and the police and crime commissioner. So how have our local authorities done during the Conservative governments since 2010?
Government grants to local authorities reduced in real terms by 40 percent between 2010 and 2020.
This had a disproportionate effect on authorities in the most deprived areas as their other sources of income – council tax and business rates – were proportionately lower than the wealthier authorities. This meant services had to be cut to a greater extent in the poorest areas.
The 2019 Conservative manifesto put great store on ‘levelling up.’
It stated: “We need to get away from the idea that ‘Whitehall knows best’ and that all growth must inevitably start in London.”
Talking of the Towns Fund, it stated: “Above all, we want the town’s future to be in the hands of the people who live there.”
We now know that ‘levelling up’ led to costly competitive bidding by local authorities with most authorities being unsuccessful and Whitehall making the final decision. It also led to Tory Ministers granting funding to each other’s constituencies, funds going predominantly to constituencies with Tory MPs with even Rishi Sunak’s relatively wealthy Yorkshire constituency getting money whereas more deprived areas did not.
The game was given away less than two years ago when in his speech to Tory activists in wealthy Tunbridge Wells, Rishi Sunak said: “I managed to start changing the funding formulas to make sure that areas like this are getting the funding they deserve, because we inherited a bunch of formulas from the Labour Party that shoved funding into deprived urban areas and, you know, that needed to be undone. I started the work of undoing that.”
The vital services provided by local authorities have been hollowed out over the last 14 years.
In effect, the quality of all our lives has been diminished as a result. The most disadvantaged have suffered the most. At the forthcoming elections, would you really vote for a candidate from the Conservative Party?
Mike Baldwin
Via email