‘The current situation councils have been placed in is literally unsustainable, the funding system for local councils is broken.’

Dagenham and Rainham Labour Prospective Parliamentary Candidate Margaret Mullane today shares her monthly column in the Havering Daily.

You really don’t have to be a qualified accountant or an expert on local government to know that something is radically wrong with the system that funds local councils’ services. It feels and in fact is, broken.

The problem has been a long time in the making, it started with Government at Westminster drastically cutting the level of grant funding for councils but continues to heap legally binding responsibilities on them, for example and most importantly for social care of adults and children. As if that wasn’t bad enough the Tory Government fiddled with the formula by which it allocates the grants so that areas with higher needs had funding shifted away from them to the leafy shire areas of England, areas which tend to have lower levels of social need.

It didn’t stop there though. The formula is applied to old census data which doesn’t relate to current population numbers.

On top of all that the numbers of people who require social care services, whether elderly persons or children with complex needs, has grown and care costs have mushroomed. So around 70% of all that councils such as Havering spend is on statutory services for a small section of their borough’s population.

The consequences of the homelessness epidemic that has greatly worsened over the last 10 years also land on local councils. The weekly cost of temporary accommodation for London Borough councils is now£90 million.

The upshot of this is that the current situation councils have been placed in is literally unsustainable. I’m sure that many The Havering Daily readers will have watched the recent BBC Panorama programme that focussed on the struggles of Havering Council to navigate a path through this minefield. I thought the Council came over well, explaining the almost impossible position they are in through no fault of its own.

So what can be done. I hope to be the Member of Parliament for Dagenham and Rainham following the General Election and I will be joining the calls for a fair funding review to be urgently carried out for how the Government distributes its grants to councils. There also needs to be a review of business rates, which currently is unfair to small businesses and shops whilst large companies often pay relatively low levels.

There are quick measures that a government that cared about the problem of homelessness can implement. Firstly, ban no fault evictions of renters, incredibly the Tory Government promised to do so but has reneged on its promise. Alongside this, facilitate councils to build more genuinely affordable social rented homes.

The Labour Mayors of cities and regions elected across all parts of England in the last week, including the new Labour Mayor of the West Midlands, Richard Parker, have made clear that Whitehall does not know best and powers and resources need to be devolved so that more decisions can be taken closer to communities.

Local government and its vital services to people and communities are too important to let collapse, we need action.  

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