Massive debts force many UK councils to slash services. Will your area be affected?
Category
🗞
NewsTranscript
00:00Well, councils have, like the rest of us, got to sort of make their funding sort of
00:05stretch to whatever the sort of needs are. Now of course, as we all know, we experience
00:10times when inflation sort of runs away with our spending power, and of course we then
00:14have to sort of reduce. Councils are in an even worse position because of course they've
00:19actually sort of suffered from inflation, but more particularly the sort of the largest
00:23amount of sort of funding they get is from the government, the so-called capital grant,
00:26and that varies across the piece. But if I sort of say or tell you that on average that's
00:33gone down since 2010 when the sort of Conservatives first got in and instituted austerity by an
00:38average of 60%, which is phenomenal. So you imagine that in the last 14 years, your income
00:45had gone down by 60%. You really would be sort of in difficulties.
00:50Labour would say that it's the previous administration's fault that we're in this situation. What are
00:54they planning to do to resolve this issue?
00:57Well, I mean, every government that comes in will always blame the last lot. Yeah, Labour's
01:02answer of course is quite clearly that they recognise that there are difficulties and
01:06there are sort of big, big problems with sort of public service provision. But of course,
01:11as we said earlier, the sort of the current Labour government make great claims about
01:15the fact that there is very little money about. In fact, there are sort of huge holes that
01:18they've got to fill. Hence the fact we've got the whole aspect of sort of money having
01:22to come from sort of employers, national insurance and other sort of means such as
01:26inheritance tax.
01:27The big issue you said was care provision. Can you see a future perhaps where that's
01:31removed from councils and funded centrally or funded in a different way?
01:36Councils are getting stretched every which way. And the difficulty is as our sort of
01:40ageing population sort of pays less in, and of course, they have to then have pension
01:43which of course comes from central government, there is less money in the system. But of
01:48course, what they sort of know is that sort of the expectation is increasing, and their
01:53ability to provide that sort of expectation is decreasing. So yeah, everyone is pretty
01:57sort of dissatisfied with the current level.