£15 million extra funding for local councils

The Communities Secretary has announced £15 million grants to local councils to help ‘ease the pressures’ on local services.

Sajid Javid has announced grants totalling £15 million will be given to local councils to help with local services such as housing, schooling and health services resulting from recent migration.

The grants are the first allocations from the Controlling Migration Fund (CMF) launched in November 2016, which allows local authorities in England to bid for funding totalling £100 million over four years from 2016 to 2017, to 2019 to 2020.

The funding will supplement local authorities’ budgets of £200 billion across the four year period up to 2020.

Councils receiving these grants have developed plans to ease pressures arising from migration and at the same time deliver benefits to their wider communities.

The projects announced are as diverse as the communities they will help, ranging from plans to deliver additional English language learning for school children who use English as a second language, to seeking to clamp down on rogue landlords to improve the overall quality of local housing and the local environment.

Sajid Javid said: “Migration brings great benefits to this country but, in some places, significant population changes in a short space of time have put pressures on public services.

“This new funding will help councils rise to the challenge of reducing the impact of migration on local communities in a variety of ways – whether that’s tackling the small minority of rogue landlords who damage neighbourhoods with overcrowded properties, providing English language classes to ensure effective integration rather than reliance on translation services, or boosting the number of teaching assistants in schools to ensure all children get excellent teaching.”

Lord Bourne, Minister for Faith, said: “Local councils have clearly drawn on their knowledge of their areas to submit strong proposals. This funding will help provide practical solutions for local communities so that councils can improve services for everyone. We will keep a keen eye on progress and make sure other councils can learn from their experiences to see what works best.”