James Buckley, of Inbetweeners fame, was speaking for all of us when he asked, “Why are councils fucking taking more money off me and doing less?” The object of Buckley’s ire – a new charge for green waste removal – has become common. Where I live, for the pleasure of having grass trimmings taken away, I would pay £75 annually. So, what’s changed? It’s not like they were doing us a favour before – we’ve always paid for it.
Buckley is also right that we are paying more council tax than we used to, with council tax increasing by 51 per cent since 2010, to an average of £2,171 in 2024. And it’s about to go up again this April. Yet the services that council tax is supposed to fund, like libraries and bin collections, have been in a state of managed decline.
The penny-pinching and poor services are really biting into confidence in local government. I asked a friend where he thought it was all going. His answer was depressing: “admin?” Unfortunately, my friend is very much in the majority. Exclusive polling by Labour Together found that people massively misunderstand how councils spend money. When asked for their best guess, the public overestimates the percentage spent on everything except for the one area where it is all actually going.
The public believes that the largest share of council spending goes to central and other services (14 per cent), which sounds a bit like administration. Housing and highways are both big winners in the public imagination, with each estimated to receive 12 per cent of council spending. In reality, central services only accounts for 7 per cent – half of what the public expected. The proportion spent on housing and highways is even smaller, just 4 per cent, a third of the 12 per cent estimated by the public.
The elephant in the room is care. Adult social care, which the public estimates takes up 13 per cent, actually accounts for 39 per cent. While children’s social care, which is thought to be only 11 per cent of spending, takes up 22 per cent. In total, on average, nearly two-thirds (61 per cent) of a council’s budget goes to care.
But because social services are used by so few, this spending is invisible to most people. In Shropshire, 31 per cent of the council’s budget went on long- and short-term adult care support for just 2 per cent of the population in 2023. And the costs are growing: in Blackpool, 79 per cent of the council’s budget went to care in 2023, up from 48 per cent in 2011.
Care spending has grown because the statutory duties authorities are required to provide have become more expensive to provide, even as their funding has dropped. So they’ve cut the activities they’re not required to perform, with some councils proposing to cut bin collections to just twice a month. The result is dirty streets and potholes. The belief that bureaucracy is sucking the life out of civil society is creating a mounting sense of anger. As Christabel Cooper, Labour Together’s director of research, says, “This misperception is what Reform is exploiting when it claims that the councils it controls will be able to dramatically cut waste.”
Reform’s promises have turned public frustration into political momentum. The idea that diversity and climate policies are consuming council budgets is potent when the information gap around councils’ responsibilities and budgets is so large. However, the £52 million spent by councils on diversity across the UK over three years works out at around 26p per person per year. The £32 billion spent on adult social care in England in 2023/24 costs us each £550.
Reform councillors are just finding out the limits of their narrative. Less than 6 months after taking office, Reform authorities across England have announced that council tax increases will likely go ahead, because, as it turns out, there is nothing left to cut. Ultimately, what propelled Reform to power may be its undoing.
[Further reading: The rise of Labour’s punchy progressives]
Content from our partners
Related
