Local government funding in England has been in crisis for years (Covid has exposed dire position of England’s local councils, 10 March), as successive governments have taken ever more power away. Its finances have been the victim of the totally inadequate council tax for decades, and an ever-reducing central grant. In addition, for a number of years, most councils accepted the government’s “council tax freeze grant”, effectively a bribe not to raise council tax rather than face a local referendum if they did. As a result, the county council of which I was a member during that period stopped being a provider and became a “commissioner” of what services survived. It saw its staff reduced by nearly two-thirds over a five-year period. Had it not taken the freeze grant but raised its share of council tax by 2% per year, my council would have been better off by around £40m.
Local government still has the ability to deliver, but it needs urgent reform, so let’s start by replacing council tax with something more progressive and then complete the transformation of the first tier of local government in England into the unitary format.
John Marriott
North Hykeham, Lincolnshire
• The government is mean about funding local government, particularly Labour councils. But one thing it could do at very little cost is relieve councils of debt, which would remove the burden of annual repayments. Around 75% of council borrowing comes from the Public Works Loan Board and the maximum amount that the government can lend this way is £95bn. It is funded through the issuing of public bonds via the Debt Management Office. That means the government could buy back these bonds through the Bank of England and wipe off PWLB debt at a stroke. This is what happened in 2012, when it used quantitative easing to buy back £375bn of bonds held by banks to improve their liquidity.
Even if the government reduced the PWLB by half, for a city like Liverpool this would reduce annual repayments by around £15m and provide millions of pounds of extra borrowing capacity that can be used for housing and other infrastructure investment. And it would cost the government nothing.
Barry Kushner
Labour councillor, Liverpool city council
• Your excellent editorial (9 March) praising public spaces misses one key point. There is indeed a need for more “serious investment in the civic spaces that define a community’s sense of itself”. But the harm is also in the austerity cuts in routine spending on those spaces, which councillors like myself struggle with. It’s about commonplace neighbourhood services – street cleaning, mending pavements, looking after parks properly, tackling antisocial behaviour including a return of youth services, refuse collection, pest control, traffic management, street lighting, community policing, public lavatories, and all the rest.
High-profile, expensive services such as adult and children’s care, major highways, fire and police are vital, but it’s the local neighbourhood services that are most forgotten and which matter so much. These are often run by district councils – or town and parish councils – which are left out of government funding.
Tony Greaves
Liberal Democrat, House of Lords
• Re local government funding, obvious but unremarked correlations warrant comment. You report that at least 25 councils face bankruptcy and that the government spent £22bn on private test-and-trace contracts (No evidence £22bn test-and-trace scheme cut Covid rates in England, say MPs, 10 March). What a shame that money is not available to support councils – a billion each for 22 of them would more than meet their needs. It might even enable them to carry out the public health role they were landed with after the 2012 Health and Social Care Act, and deal more effectively with future coronavirus-like crises. Alongside this, disputes about the NHS pay rise make no mention of the urgent need to reinstate nurse training bursaries, iniquitously removed in 2017, an act of vandalism that goes some way to explaining nurse shortages.
Anne Leonard
York
