Kemi Badenoch, pressed on the Today programme about the leisurely pace of her policy agenda, and the looming council elections, insisted on Tuesday morning that ‘welfare is not a local government issue’. On the ballot instead, she suggested, were such issues as ‘who’s fixing the roads, potholes, [and] adult social care’.
This answer seems plausible, and that tells us much about what has gone so wrong with local government, and the increasingly huge democratic deficit in our local politics. For adult social care is a welfare issue.
It is true that town halls do not govern capital-W Welfare, narrowly conceived in terms of Universal Credit, Pension Credit, et al. Nor do they manage other major elements of the welfare state, such as the National Health Service or (with the exception of their own funds) pensions.
But they are responsible for two things: the aforementioned adult social care, and children’s services. And such is the strain of servicing these obligations that, if current trends continue, councils will end up without the funds to take good care of anything else. A report from the County Councils Network, published last year, sums up the scale of the problem:
For the 37 upper-tier councils in county areas who are members of the CCN, per-person spend children’s services has doubled since 2013-14, whilst per-head spend on adult social care has increased 50%. For those councils, these two services combined account for up to three quarters of some councils’ entire budgets.
On average, seven pounds in every ten spent by local authorities is consumed by these two spending areas alone. This fact, more than any other, explains why town halls across the country are in a state of perpetual crisis – and why voters rightly feel they are getting less and less bang for their council tax buck.
The basic problem is simple: councils are responsible for children’s services and adult social care, but they do not have power over them. Neither policy is devolved; town halls do not get to set their own policy for SEND (Special Educational Needs and Development) or anything else.
Instead, the rules governing entitlement to such benefits are laid down by parliament, which then charges local authorities with delivering them. It’s the worst of both worlds: central control over policy, but without full central funding. It suits Westminster, because it allows expensive spending areas to be kept off the Chancellor’s books. But it does this at the expense of hollowing out local government.
Entitlement spending, as currently constituted, is very hard to control: instead of starting with a budget and working out how to spend it, government instead creates qualifying criteria (which seem inevitably to compass more and more people) and then stumps up whatever cash the system demands.
This is bad enough at the national level, where spending on pensions and the NHS is gradually eating the rest of the budget. But it is even worse when the responsibility is laid on town halls. Legally obliged to meet ever-rising demand, and with no political control over the relevant policy areas, councils are forced to assign a larger and larger share of their budgets to Whitehall policies.
Inevitably, this comes at the expense of the things that voters tend to think of as the council’s actual responsibility – fixing the roads and collecting the bins. Slowly but surely, community events such as fireworks displays are pared back or cancelled, as are projects to maintain or beautify the public realm. Lovely but potentially costly street features, such as trees, are more literally cut.
Beyond these practicalities, this dynamic also creates a serious democratic deficit. If 70 per cent of a council’s budget is committed to servicing policy commitments made in Whitehall, over which councillors have no say, that means a local election is really only being fought over less than one third of the local budget.
Councils are responsible for children’s services and adult social care, but they do not have power over them
That is bad enough in itself, but the blurred lines also make it harder for voters to hold the right people accountable. What’s the point of turfing out one party over, say, bin collections when the other lot are simply going to inherit the same fiscal straitjacket? How many voters realise that their council tax is increasingly just a mislabelled social care levy?
Many councils have, of course, played a significant part in their own downfalls. But too many MPs seem content to blame local authorities for problems which were authored in Westminster, of which the gutting of council budgets to service London-mandated welfare policies is only the biggest example; one thinks also of the Conservatives attacking Birmingham City Council over a bin strike brought about by an absurd equal pay settlement under the Equality Act, which the Tories spent 14 years doing nothing about.
The only way to restore honesty, accountability, and coherence to local government is to restore the alignment of responsibility and control. If Westminster wants social care to be a local responsibility, locally funded, that’s fine – but it should then be up to councils to set their own social care policies. If instead MPs want a national social care policy, then it should be funded by the national government (even if it remains administered by councils).
Unless and until that happens, local authorities will continue to demand more and more in council tax whilst delivering less and less in the form of tangible everyday services. Perhaps MPs can live with that – so long as voters keep blaming the wrong people.
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