Debate on the ability of local authorities to deliver essential services, House of Lords, 24 January 2019

Key messages

• Councils are uniquely placed to build communities that are inclusive, cohesive and promote people’s life chances. They do this by tailoring more than 800 local services to the needs of their residents, to meet local and national challenges.
• Between 2010 and 2020, councils will have lost almost 60p in every £1 of central government funding. This has created an unsustainable gap in council funding that is having a significant impact on councils and their communities.
• The extra funding in the 2018 Budget showed that the Government is listening to our call for investment to ease some of the pressures facing local services next year. There was also new money from central government included in the provisional local government finance settlement for 2019/20.
• We are also pleased that the Government has listened to our concerns and is providing an emergency injection of £350 million for Special Educational Needs and Disabilities capital investment, and high needs budgets, over the next two years. However, it will only partially address the funding gap councils face in providing SEND support, which is estimated to be up to £1.6 billion by 2021.
• Councils will still face an overall funding gap of £3.1 billion in 2019/20, which we estimate will rise to £8 billion by 2024/25. These pressures are impacting on the ability of local authorities to deliver essential services such as children’s social care, public health, trading standards and homelessness support.
• It is vital that the Government uses the 2019 Spending Review to deliver truly sustainable funding for local government. Without this investment, the councils’ ability to deliver the essential services on which their residents rely is put at substantial risk.

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Debate on the ability of local authorities to deliver essential services, House of Lords, 24 January 2019