The chancellor delivered the budget this week giving councils the opportunity to bid for funds but offering no resolution to long-term issues such as business rates retention, adult and children’s social care and fair funding.
It is a sad fact of life that the Budget is never a very exciting document for local government. It’s whole purpose is to set a fiscal policy and the Spending Review should be the main driving force for local government.
However, the general consensus is that the budget was nevertheless another missed opportunity to show vision for local authorities.
As I said when I wrote on the Spending Review, what is not happening is a whole range of things which could help, support and encourage local authorities.
We are lacking proposals around business rates retention, a devolution White paper, a fair funding formula any form of paper on a sustainable solution for adult social care, and help for beleaguered children’s services.
Detail
The other frustrating thing about the budget is it offers only a superficial glimpse of new initiatives; the detailed papers will follow and over the course of the next few days we shall get the detail on a series of initiatives which look as if they may be funds to bid for competitively.
This is a difficult time for finance in local authorities and the ability to put together a time-consuming bid for new initiatives is minimal. Indeed, unless the fundamentals are in place and we have resilient, sustainable local government the new initiatives cannot thrive.
The major announcements:
Levelling up fund. This was, in fact announced in the Spending Review last November. The £4.6bn fund will be available across the UK and bid for competitively. It is aimed at infrastructure that has a visible impact on people and their communities. This includes town centres and high streets, local transport schemes and upgrading local culture and heritage.
UK community renewal fund. This is a £220m fund to replace EU funding. The prospectus for this has been published and the fund is an open competition. Although it is UK- wide, the prospectus identifies 100 places based on an index of economic resilience. The fund is available for 2021-22 and is Transition Funding to a new UK shared prosperity fund to be announced later this year.
Community ownership fund. This is a £150m fund which sounds familiar. It will allow community groups to bid up to £250,000 matched funding to help them take over, or buy, community assets. Details are to be announced shortly. This was a localisation fund originally and although it had some take up it was quite limited.
Towns fund. Forty five named towns will receive up to a £25m share of more than £1bn. This is to allow recovery from the pandemic.
Freeports. There was an announcement about the eight successful bidders to become freeports. It is hoped these will start operation by late 2021. They will be national hubs for international trade, innovation and commerce.
Respite Rooms. There is a total of £144m, although much of this was in the spending review to provide a variety of services to tackle violence against girls and women.
Universal Credit. Generally welcomed was the announcement of the extension to the universal credit uplift.
There are other things which I would not expect to find in the budget but that we need urgently. It is striking at this time, and with three weeks to go to the new financial year, there has been no mention of the amount of the public health grant .
Local authorities would also like some assurance on a multi-year settlement next year and a continuation of the grant to meet all extra pandemic costs and loss of income.
Given the current state of local authority finances it may well be that there is simply not enough energy to produce a set of competitive bids for all these new initiatives. Only time will tell.
Richard Harbord is former chief executive at Boston Borough Council.
Photo by HM Treasury, Flickr
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