“Anyone can do the sums,” Clive Betts told Michael Gove during the Levelling Up Secretary’s latest grilling by the chair of the Levelling Up Committee – but if you are the senior cabinet minister in charge of local government, you might not want to.
The sorry state of council finances – the subject of yesterday’s committee session – makes for grim reading. Even the most competent of operators will struggle to talk away a sectoral crisis. One in five authorities that were surveyed by the non-partisan Local Government Association (LGA) say they are likely to go bankrupt. When New Statesman Spotlight polled more than 500 councillors last month, the figure was just shy of one in four.
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