Councils were dished up more cash than they had been led to expect in the Spending Review. They were handed £4.8bn of new grant funding over the next three years, to the initial relief of a sector that had been staring into a fiscal chasm.

Separately, £3.6bn of the previously announced £5.4bn of investment in adult social care will be routed through local authorities. The Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) has said the headline 3% increase for councils would be ‘more like 1.8% per year' once reforms to social care are stripped out, with the ‘front-loaded' nature of funding – about £1.6bn next year – increasing pressure in later years.