Opinion: We Need to Talk About the Cost of Local Government
The average council tax bill has crossed £2,400 per year for the first time in history. If you live in certain parts of the South East, you are paying closer to £2,800. And for that money — which represents a significant proportion of disposable income for many households — you are receiving services that have been cut, delayed or eliminated over a period of years. That combination should generate political fury. The fact that it generates relatively modest protest says something troubling about the state of civic awareness in modern Britain.
The honest account of how we got here requires confronting some uncomfortable realities. The central government grant to local authorities has been reduced substantially over the past fifteen years. The demand for adult social care — the statutory duty to provide care for elderly and disabled people who cannot afford it themselves — has grown relentlessly as the population ages. These two trends in combination have produced a structural gap between what councils are legally required to do and what they can afford to fund, a gap that has been papered over by successive council tax rises, service cuts, and in an increasing number of cases, statutory financial intervention.
The result is that local government in much of England is essentially delivering two services — adult social care and children’s services — and virtually nothing else of substance. The libraries, parks, local road maintenance, youth services, community centres and environmental health functions that once constituted the visible fabric of local public life have been reduced to minimal or nominal levels. This is not a management failure. It is a funding failure that honest political discourse must acknowledge.
The solution requires an honest conversation about either significantly increasing resources for local government through central grant or fundamentally reshaping the social care system so its costs do not fall disproportionately on property-based taxation. Neither option is politically comfortable. But continuing to raise council tax while watching services deteriorate is not a sustainable settlement.
