Local services will cost at least £8bn more by 2024

The Local Government Association has warned that councils will face extra cost pressures of almost £8 billion by 2024/25 just to keep vital local services running at today’s levels.

Councils leaders stress that this total is about addressing new pressures that councils will face in the next three years, it does not include the very real pressures that councils are facing here and now such as paying care workers a fair wage or investing in the early intervention services which help families and young people falling into crisis.

Ahead of the Spending Review, the LGA says that the significant financial pressures facing local services cannot be met by council tax income alone. Councils are particularly alarmed that the government’s solution for tackling social care’s core existing pressures appears to be solely through the use of council tax, and the social care precept.

The LGA’s detailed submission to this month’s Treasury Spending Review is calling for councils to be given a multi-year settlement which provides sufficient additional government funding and certainty to meet growing cost pressures and existing challenges. Council leaders also say that the Spending Review also presents an opportunity to reset public spending in a way that is fit for the future, flexible to allow the delivery of local priorities, and empowers councils to deliver on the ambition to level up our communities that central and local government share.

Councils are also therefore calling on the government to use the Spending Review to create an ongoing Community Investment Fund, worth £1 billion in 2022/23. This unringfenced fund could be used by councils to invest in supporting individuals, strengthening communities, and tackling priorities in their local areas, including health inequalities - all of which will be vital to levelling up across the country.

James Jamieson, LGA chairman, said: “Councils continue to face severe funding and demand pressures that will stretch the local services our communities rely on to the limit. Securing the long-term sustainability of local services must therefore be the top priority in the Spending Review.

“If we are to come out of this pandemic with a society that is truly levelled up, the vital services that councils provide must be at the heart of it. Councils need certainty over their medium-term finances, adequate funding to tackle day-to-day pressures and long-term investment in people and transforming places across all parts of the country to turn levelling up from a political slogan to a reality that leads to real change for people’s lives.

“Levelling up has to also mean a radical reset of the relationship between central and local - building back better means building back local. With adequate resources and freedoms, councils can continue to provide local solutions to the national challenges we face and ensure all of our communities are able to prosper in the future.”