Before you shout about the bins, a guided tour of the budget your council tax is trying to cover
Your Council Is Skint Too: Where a London Borough’s Money Actually Goes
The letter arrives every spring in a brown envelope, and every spring I read it standing up in the hallway with my coat still on. The council tax has gone up again. My first thought, which I suspect is the first thought of most people in my postcode, concerns the bins. Specifically, it concerns why I am paying more when the recycling was missed twice in February and there is a mattress on the corner that has been there so long it has started to feel like a neighbour.
This year I decided to stop muttering and find out. I read my borough’s budget papers, which are public and which almost nobody reads. I sat in the gallery at a council meeting. I interviewed councillors from more than one party and two finance officers who spoke with the weariness of people who have explained this many times. What I learned has changed how I read the brown envelope.
The Bins Are a Rounding Error
Here is the fact that surprised me most. The services most of us think of as the council, the bins, street lights, parks, libraries, potholes, make up a small share of what a London borough spends. The great bulk of the budget goes on things that most residents never see, because most residents, most of the time, do not need them.
The largest is social care. Councils have a legal duty to look after elderly and disabled adults who need help to live, and children who are at risk or in care. These are services for a small number of people at a very high cost per person, and demand has been climbing for years as the population ages and needs become more complex. A finance officer told me that a handful of specialist placements for children can cost as much as running several libraries.
The Housing Emergency on the Books
The second great pressure in London is homelessness. When a family loses their home and has nowhere to go, the council must house them. With too few social homes and private rents beyond reach, boroughs end up paying for temporary accommodation, sometimes hotel rooms, sometimes flats rented nightly at steep rates. Across the capital the cost has soared, and the cross-party body that represents the boroughs has described it as the single fastest-growing strain on their budgets.
I visited a family in one such room. A mother and two children had been there for the better part of a year, cooking on a single hob. The council was paying a great deal for it. Nobody involved, not the family, not the officers, not the taxpayers, was getting value. It is the most expensive way imaginable to provide a bad home.
Where the Money Comes From
A council’s income arrives from three main places: council tax, a share of business rates, and grants from central government. Over the past decade and more, the grant from government fell sharply in real terms, and councils were expected to make up the difference locally. But council tax can only be raised by a limited percentage each year without holding a local referendum. The framework is laid out on GOV.UK. The result is a bill that goes up every year and still does not close the gap.
Council tax itself is a peculiar instrument. Bands in England are still based on property values from the early 1990s, which produces oddities that everybody in local government acknowledges and no national politician has wished to touch. A modest flat in one borough can attract a higher bill than a mansion in another.
What Gets Cut
When the duties you must perform by law consume most of the budget, the savings fall on everything else. That is why the visible services feel thinner. Library hours shrink. Youth clubs close. The park loses its keeper. The street is swept less often. Charges for parking, garden waste and bulky collections rise, which is the story of the mattress on my corner. These are precisely the things residents notice, so the council takes the blame for the squeeze in the place it has the least room to move.
A councillor of long service put it to me with some feeling. People think we are choosing not to fix the pavement, she said. We are choosing between the pavement and a child’s foster placement, and the law has already made that choice.
Is Anyone to Blame
It would be too kind to say councils are blameless. Some have made poor investments or failed to collect what they are owed, and a small number around the country have effectively declared themselves unable to balance their books. Scrutiny matters, and residents are entitled to ask hard questions. Meetings are open to the public and budget papers are online. The Greater London Authority sets its own smaller share of the bill for policing, fire and transport, and publishes its reasoning.
But the people I met were not wasting money. They were trying to fund rising need with a tax designed for another era. The spending data that the Office for National Statistics and government departments publish tells the same story in every part of the country.
What a Resident Can Do
I came away with three pieces of advice. First, read the leaflet that comes with the bill. It is dull and it explains a lot. Second, check whether you are entitled to a discount or to council tax support, which many people on low incomes do not claim; Citizens Advice can check for you. Third, vote in local elections, which decide who makes these choices and in which turnout is usually dismal.
I will continue to complain about the bins, which is the birthright of every Londoner. But I will do it knowing that the bins are not where the money went.
Local government is a gift to comedians, and the British satirical news desk has given my town hall the treatment more than once. The British Onion page and NewsThump will supply more of the same. Readers who want to know how that sort of thing gets made should try how to run a satirical website. This piece, with regret, contains only real numbers and one real mattress. My other reporting is on my author page at The London Prat.
SOURCE: https://prat.uk/