Conservative leadership candidate Rishi Sunak’s recent comments to the Tunbridge Wells party faithful simply voiced a policy that has been operating on the QT for years.
The Conservative party in power has reduced the deprivation weighting in local funding formulas, because they tended to benefit larger urban areas, which are largely Labour-controlled. They see this as reversing a method inherited from Labour’s time in Government and re-calculating it to benefit their heartlands. Not that the electorate in the shires particularly noticed, since like everywhere else they too have witnessed significant local funding cuts overall.
But it is a measure in-keeping with the Conservative Government’s subsequent bias – through its flagship Levelling Up funds – towards their Red Wall seats, over other deprived areas which are represented by Labour in Parliament. So, what would Labour do if it assumed power at Westminster? Reverse the trend again and channel local funding according to their own electoral calculations?
This creep of increasingly overt pork barrel politics into our winner-takes-all electoral system ultimately benefits no-one. It is a symptom of our fragile local financing system that the principles behind it can be determined more by the whims of the national party in power than the needs of people who rely on local services.
Currently, every type of council can reasonably claim a raw deal. Urban councils have faced disproportionate cuts amidst densely concentrated deprivation. Counties and large unitaries face the opposite problem: significant diseconomies of scale at which they must operate social services for vulnerable groups, which often includes larger elderly populations than younger cities. Meanwhile, many districts have seen their grant reduce to zero.
Before we even get into the question of distribution, resource scarcity overall is the main problem. An independent commission to reach an objective, non-partisan view on local government financing is long overdue. The elusive Fair Funding Review keeps being postponed because no-one can agree what ‘fair’ means in the context of not enough in the first place.
The sector should stand together to demand sufficient funding for all parts of the country as a priority, with different dimensions of ‘need’ recognised and provided for. Then the residents of Tunbridge Wells, along with the most deprived boroughs and everywhere in between, can feel the benefit from a system that properly responds to their varied circumstances.
Jessica Studdert is deputy chief executive at New Local
@jessstud
