Opinion: Reverse council cuts and base funding on need to support us

Cllr Saghir Alam, Cabinet Member for Corporate Services, Community Safety and Finance at Rotherham Council.

As the saying goes, all politics is local. For all the spectacle and drama that Westminster politics brings, the reality is that most people’s everyday interactions with politics come at the local level.

Whether your bins are collected on time, anti-social behaviour and littering are dealt with, and whether your parents or children can receive the care they need: at their very core these are all questions of local public service provision.

These are not particularly glamorous issues but ensuring that local services receive the funding that they deserve goes to the heart of any functioning society and can only be achieved through properly funded local councils who are working day in and day out to provide these services.

Research published earlier this year by the Special Interest Group of Municipal Authorities (SIGOMA), of which I am a vice-chair, revealed that for more than a decade, England’s most deprived councils have, on average, seen a cut in budgets almost three times as high as the richest areas.

Overflowing wheelie bins. Picture: Steve Riding.

Over the past 13 years, the people of Rotherham and Sheffield have experienced the devastating impact of continuous cuts to council budgets. Since 2010, Sheffield has experienced a 27.2 per cent real-term cut in funding and Rotherham a cut of 22.0 per cent. This represents a reduction of £855 per household in Sheffield and £641 in Rotherham.

With reports emerging that many more councils across England are at risk of insolvency and struggling to fill the £3bn black hole in funding through inflationary costs and ever-growing demand for their services, it is clear that the current system is not sustainable.

The Government needs to deliver structural change which provides local authorities with certainty. We must move back towards a revenue funding model that focuses on supporting the cost of delivering services rather than supporting the gains of wealthier councils who raise most from business rates and council tax.

This is an opportunity to rebalance the system without costing the earth and give places like Rotherham and Sheffield the tools they need to tackle everyday challenges.