The final Treasury Questions before a Budget or Autumn Statement always reveals not just what the Opposition plans to attack the government on, but also where the government is feeling particularly vulnerable. This week’s session suggested that ministers are rightly quite nervous about social care funding – and that they realise they will have to do something about it in next week’s statement.
Members from both sides of the House complained about the pressure being placed on their local authorities by the shortage of funds far adequate social care. In response, ministers repeatedly pointed to the precept on council tax and the Better Care Fund, but they also left enough of a space in their answers to suggest that they were preparing to announce something next week. Financial Secretary Jane Ellison was cool on reports in this morning’s Times that ministers might revive a ‘death tax’.
The focus still seems to be on the responsibilities of councils to use the freedoms they already have and to ensure their services are as efficient as possible. For instance, David Gauke claimed that there was ‘varied performance around the country’, pointing to differences in delayed discharges from hospital between different local authorities. The chances are that whatever is announced next week will maintain that focus on councils rather than central government, so that ministers can shift as much blame as possible onto councils and away from Whitehall. The now-cancelled Surrey referendum, for instance, was handy for ministers (though not for the councillors who had been facing asking their local electorate to approve a whopping 15 per cent rise in council tax) as a ‘yes’ vote would have allowed them to argue that local democracy was working and that they didn’t need to do anything more to help councils, while a ‘no’ vote would have demonstrated that there was insufficient public appetite for raising taxes to plug the black hole.
The question is whether the government thinks it can get away with yet another gesture like the precept, which was denounced by the Tory-led Local Government Association within minutes of it being announced by George Osborne in the 2015 Spending Review, or whether the political pressure from Tory councils and MPs (including some frustrated Cabinet ministers) has grown so much that a serious change to the funding regime is needed.
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