Adult social care factories
Local government used to fund youth clubs, libraries and Sure Start centres. But years of cuts have stripped it to the bone, as a new IfG report lays bare
The UK is often said to have an ‘unwritten’ constitution, but that’s not quite accurate. Much of it is written down but, like my receipts, scattered across different drawers. It’s more precise to describe our constitution as ‘uncodified’ — underpinned as it is by statutes, conventions and judicial decisions.
However, if we ever decided to junk the principle of parliamentary sovereignty and arrange some sort of Hamiltonian rap battle-style constitutional convention built on only three pillars, I’d go with:
Michael Crick making inexperienced by-election candidates freeze in fear
The DUP’s Jim Shannon intervening in the adjournment debate
The Institute for Government’s Public Services Performance Tracker
And as luck would have it, that’s what we’re going to dive into today — specifically, the state of local government.
The past is a foreign country; they fund local government there.
You may be aware that the Conservative-led coalition government instituted a series of cuts across the public sector. But local government took one hell of a beating. According to the IfG, the spending power of local authorities fell by nearly a quarter (24%) in real terms between 2010-11 and 2019-20. But due to population growth, spending power per person fell by an even greater 28.8%.
And despite a little loosening under the Johnson and Sunak administrations, by the time of the 2024 general election, spending power was still 22.2% lower. The report’s authors, Stuart Hoddinott and Amber Dellar, don’t hold back: “Many public services are on their knees, and have been for years.”