You are viewing 1 of your 1 free articles
Council spend on housing cut in half over past decade, study reveals
The amount of money spent by local authorities on housing and planning has been slashed in half over the past eight years, new analysis of local government spending has found.
According to a study by the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS), the amount of money spent by councils across the UK in 2017/18 on planning, development and housing services was more than 50% lower in real terms than the equivalent spend in 2009/10.
The IFS analysis found that while spend on homelessness services had increased across the period, budgets for housing advice, improving and renewing private sector housing, and the Supporting People programme had fallen by two-thirds.
The Supporting People programme is an initiative that was launched in 2003 aimed at helping vulnerable people to live independently and provide them with other services to achieve this.
The drop in housing spend made up part of an overall drop in local authority spend over the past 10 years, which saw average local authority spend last year hit levels 21% lower than in 2009/10.
READ MORE
However, it was found that the cuts were not equally distributed across the country and cuts have been larger in more deprived areas. Spending per person in 2017/18 in the most deprived fifth of councils was 1.52 times lower than in 2009/10, the report discovered.
In the least deprived fifth of councils, spend per person had fallen by 1.25 times per person.
Housing is one of the areas that has seen the largest cuts alongside spend on children’s and youth centres (which has seen a 60% drop in funding), leisure services (a 40% drop), and highways and transport (its spend dropped by more than 40%).
The amount of money spent on adult social care fell by 5% across the period, while spending on acute children’s social care services rose by 10%.
Revenues from council tax and business rates – seen as the two most important sources of income for councils in the future – were unlikely to keep pace with rising demands for public services, said the report.
The IFS predicted that even if council tax was to increase by 4.7% every year, which is the average increase across councils this year, adult social care would account for more than half of these taxes by the mid-2030s. This, the report said, would leave little room for providing more money to services, such as housing.
The IFS called for a national debate on the future of council spending. One suggestion was to get the government to raise more revenues nationally, which could then be distributed to councils according to need. The IFS also said councils could be given extra powers to raise taxes locally and give them more control over spending decisions.
David Phillips, associate director at the IFS and an author of the report, said: “Current plans for councils to rely on council tax and business rates for the vast bulk of their funding don’t look compatible with our expectations of what councils should provide.
“A proper national debate on how much we are willing to pay and what we expect of councils is therefore needed. Without it, we will default to a situation where the services councils can provide are gradually eroded without an explicit decision being taken – until ad hoc funding is found as a response to political pressure. Such an approach would not be conducive to long-term planning by either councils or the government.”
