LGA Chair Cllr Louise Gittins' speech to the LGA Annual Conference 2024

Good afternoon.

It’s great to be with you all in Harrogate. Thanks to Gareth and his entire team for their warm welcome.

It’s an absolute pleasure to welcome you all to the LGA’s Annual Conference.

For those I haven’t met yet, I’m Councillor Louise Gittins, Leader of Cheshire West and Chester Council. I was delighted to be elected cross party Chair of the LGA in July.

It’s wonderful to see such a broad spectrum of local government talent gathered here with a shared passion for serving our communities.

I thank each of you for your continued service to your local places. 

All colleagues in local government work daily to bring about real change in peoples’ lives.

Behind every statistic, announcement or headline, there are real stories of families, communities, and businesses that have been positively impacted by the work of local councils.

And the LGA is delighted as your membership body to be able to support you in everything you strive to achieve, for example, with your workforce.

Alongside Solace, Regional Employer Organisations and with some welcome funding from government as part of our sector support programme, we’ll be launching our national recruitment campaign shortly.

With the ‘Make a Difference’ campaign, and our newly rebranded local government graduate scheme called ‘Impact’, we’ll be highlighting that local government is a great way to forge a career, working alongside other talented individuals.

Over the past year, we also launched the Step Ahead campaign, and worked closely with the Care Leavers’ Covenant to help councils strengthen their support for care leavers.

I’m looking forward to the conversation later this evening with some of our partners about how we continue to enhance the outcomes for care leavers.  

To help accelerate this work, we’ll be supporting you by sharing best practice, producing an employment toolkit, and case studies, to be published next Spring.

In March, our Economy and Resources Board, led by Cllr Pete Marland, and over 170 council leaders joined us to call on the Chancellor to extend the Household Support Fund at the Spring Budget. 

The resulting 600 million pounds announced for councils for this financial year was welcome and will go some way to supporting those families in need. 

In the longer term, we want to see this support guaranteed.

We joined forces with the Electoral Commission and the Jo Cox Foundation to protect candidates from abuse during the local elections. 

And through determined and persistent work, Cllr Marianne Overton and our Civility in Public Life Steering group, successfully lobbied the government to introduce a dedicated, named, police contact for all elected representatives and candidates to liaise with on security matters, and the thirty one million pounds announced for protecting democratic processes. 

Our improvement offer has also gone from strength to strength.

I am extremely proud that 100 per cent of chief executives and 97 per cent of council leaders say that LGA support has had a positive impact for their authority. 

The sector support programme saves our sector tens of millions of pounds each year. It does this by delivering significant economies of scale, providing support nationally and through a peer-based approach. 

I am grateful to Cllr Abi Brown and our Improvement and Innovation Board for their leadership in helping us to support councils.  

These are examples of what we can achieve when we come together as a sector and improve and support each other as one. 

I cannot stress enough how critical our cross-party collaboration has been in achieving these wins.  

From Labour to Conservative to Liberal Democrat, Green, and independent councillors, we have all come together in the spirit of service to our communities.  

It is essential to remember that national government on its own, regardless of party, cannot deliver without the support and expertise of local councils as equal partners. 

Since the General Election, the LGA has worked tirelessly to ensure local government remains at the forefront of the national agenda.  

Since we last met in Bournemouth, the LGA has produced a blueprint for how national government could work with local government.  

Our Local Government White Paper, which was published just before the election, set out how government could empower local councils to deliver for their residents. 

And since the election, we have been making clear in all our conversations with Ministers, opposition spokespeople and all parliamentarians that local government is key to solving our biggest national challenges.  

But we have stressed that without longer term financial planning, a clearer and fairer funding system for councils, as a nation we will continue to constrain economic growth. 

Ahead of conference, we ran a short survey of chief executives on their council’s financial position, in particular the likelihood of needing to apply for Exceptional Financial Support. 

The results were stark!  

Around a quarter of councils, and 44 per cent of social care councils are likely to request Exceptional Financial Support from MHCLG in the next two financial years!  

A large proportion of you told us that if Exceptional Financial Support did not exist, your council would be likely to issue a Section 114 notice.  

Collectively with all the representative bodies in our sector, we have made clear to the Chancellor that stabilising our finances will not only reduce the need for costs falling on other public services such as the NHS, but it will also support the Government in its missions. 

We showed during the pandemic, that councils were key to securing the wellbeing of our communities. And we continue to work hard to tackle those health inequalities in our communities.  

It is a shocking fact that health inequalities exist both between and within local authority areas, with almost 20 extra years of healthy life enjoyed by those in the most affluent areas compared with those in the most deprived.  

This stark inequality is played out in communities around the country, showing that the circumstances in which we live - the wider determinants of health - shape our health.  

Councils have a long, tradition of understanding these challenges and developing approaches to respond to them.  

Health inequalities are not inevitable. 

Addressing the deep-rooted, society-wide challenges of health inequalities requires action by communities, businesses and national government.  

We continue to call on government to invest in the public health grant and other vital areas of prevention, such as supported housing and health visiting.  

This must be part of a new long-term approach to funding prevention and early action support, and a more sophisticated understanding of the social return on that investment.  

Independent research commissioned by the LGA and County Councils Network earlier this year found that, despite bespoke financial support for some councils, many councils are running a deficit on their High Needs budget.  

With cumulative deficits currently at £3.2 billion, it is essential that Government writes off councils’ high needs deficits as a matter of urgency. 

In the long term, we want to see reform of the SEND system which improves outcomes for all children with special needs and is also financially sustainable for councils. 

As your chair, I will continue to advocate for the most vulnerable in our communities.  

We all witnessed this summer when councils and communities stood up when hate and far right bigotry threatened violence on our streets. We stood together. 

Communities rallied together, cleaned up local areas, protected places of worship and provided heart-warming acts of generosity.   

Councils worked hard not just to clear up the physical damage to their areas but to start to fix those broken bonds within their communities.  

Working with faith groups, community leaders, voluntary organisations and others, you restored community cohesion, tackled myths and dis-information and worked with the police and government to restore calm.  

I’m very proud that our sector led improvement continues to be very successful, reaching every council in the country in one way or another.

Corporate Peer Challenge is a key part of our sector support programme, and we are continually updating and improving it, and this year we have launched our Strengthened CPC offer.

It is vital that as a sector we continue to take ownership of our own improvement and assurance. 

We, therefore, welcome the government’s commitment to resetting the relationship between central and local government and as part of this we look forward to discussing how we can shift the dial in relation to the ongoing assurance of local government performance.

You have my commitment that we’ll continue to enhance the support available to you as members.

For instance, First, the LGA’s flagship membership magazine, has been redesigned to make it even better at keeping elected members informed of what the LGA is doing on behalf of its member councils as part of our many communications channels with you.

Look out for your new-look First magazine in the post or visit the LGA’s hub to pick up a copy.  

It has been great to meet so many of you during my first weeks.  

I have enjoyed hearing your ambitions for your local areas, and learning about the challenges you are facing.  

One of the most important things we’ve aimed to do this year is ensure our work is not London-centric.  

It has been a pleasure to visit colleagues across the country and and ensure we remain connected to the realities on the ground, wherever in the country that may be, whatever rosette you wear, or council you represent.  

I want to take a moment to thank those who have been involved in providing political leadership to the LGA on behalf of councils.  

I thank my predecessor Shaun Davies, for his leadership of the organisation. I am pleased he continues to be a vocal advocate for our entire sector in Parliament.  

I also pay tribute to all those Board members that have been part of the LGAs governance structures. Thank you for continuing to share your time, knowledge, and experience with us.  

And of course, I am grateful to our vice chairs, Cllrs Kevin Bentley, Bev Craig, Joe Harris and Marianne Overton.  

I’m very pleased to call you friends, it’s an absolute pleasure to work alongside four committed and hardworking political group leaders daily.  

And thank you to Joanna, who has completed her first six months with us, navigating the challenges of the General Election and leading us through a period of change.

As we move forward, our job is to help councils innovate for the future. 

Whether it’s through AI, or securing a sustainable workforce, or creating flexible funding models, we will be here to support you every step of the way.

Thank you for being here, for your dedication, and for your unwavering commitment to your communities. 

Together, councils across the country, of all tiers, and of every political persuasion or none will continue to make a difference for our residents, and at my first conference as your Chair, I can’t wait to keep working with you all to help make our shared ambitions a reality.