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Report
Many UK councils facing financial meltdown: What are the governments plans to save our services?
National World - LocalTV
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12/11/2024
Massive debts force many UK councils to slash services. Will your area be affected?
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News
Transcript
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00:00
Well, councils have, like the rest of us, got to sort of make their funding sort of
00:05
stretch to whatever the sort of needs are. Now of course, as we all know, we experience
00:10
times when inflation sort of runs away with our spending power, and of course we then
00:14
have to sort of reduce. Councils are in an even worse position because of course they've
00:19
actually sort of suffered from inflation, but more particularly the sort of the largest
00:23
amount of sort of funding they get is from the government, the so-called capital grant,
00:26
and that varies across the piece. But if I sort of say or tell you that on average that's
00:33
gone down since 2010 when the sort of Conservatives first got in and instituted austerity by an
00:38
average of 60%, which is phenomenal. So you imagine that in the last 14 years, your income
00:45
had gone down by 60%. You really would be sort of in difficulties.
00:50
Labour would say that it's the previous administration's fault that we're in this situation. What are
00:54
they planning to do to resolve this issue?
00:57
Well, I mean, every government that comes in will always blame the last lot. Yeah, Labour's
01:02
answer of course is quite clearly that they recognise that there are difficulties and
01:06
there are sort of big, big problems with sort of public service provision. But of course,
01:11
as we said earlier, the sort of the current Labour government make great claims about
01:15
the fact that there is very little money about. In fact, there are sort of huge holes that
01:18
they've got to fill. Hence the fact we've got the whole aspect of sort of money having
01:22
to come from sort of employers, national insurance and other sort of means such as
01:26
inheritance tax.
01:27
The big issue you said was care provision. Can you see a future perhaps where that's
01:31
removed from councils and funded centrally or funded in a different way?
01:36
Councils are getting stretched every which way. And the difficulty is as our sort of
01:40
ageing population sort of pays less in, and of course, they have to then have pension
01:43
which of course comes from central government, there is less money in the system. But of
01:48
course, what they sort of know is that sort of the expectation is increasing, and their
01:53
ability to provide that sort of expectation is decreasing. So yeah, everyone is pretty
01:57
sort of dissatisfied with the current level.
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