The Tory Record at your Town Hall: Local Authorities have faced a reduction to core funding from the Government of nearly £16 billion over the preceding decade. That means that councils will have lost 60p out of every £1 the Government had provided to spend on local services in the last eight years. Local services the elderly depend on. Local services for families bringing up children. In 2021 Council services have gone backwards for 10 years of Tory Austerity. Housing: Rents have soared, while wages have stalled. Tenant insecurity has risen. Overcrowding is at record levels. Homelessness has increased. One in 200 people in England are homeless, according to Shelter. Rough sleeping is up over the decade: 600 homeless people now die each year on the streets or in hostels, up 24% since 2010. The average life expectancy for homeless people is 45.
Welfare changes have fuelled and intensified the crisis. Cuts and freezes to housing benefit – designed to make rent affordable – have left low-income working families having to find hundreds of pounds a month to pay landlords. Universal credit has put tens of thousands of tenants in debt and at risk of eviction.
Social housing might once have provided some respite. But 60% cuts to affordable housebuilding grants in 2010 choked off the supply of new social homes, while existing stock continued to be savaged by Right to Buy: 165,000 social homes have been lost this way since 2010. Some 39,000 social homes were built in 2010; since down to 6,500. Local government
Back in 2012, a notorious PowerPoint slide circulated in local government called the Graph of Doom. It demonstrated that if austerity cuts and demographic pressures (more older people living longer) continued, councils would be unable to afford to provide anything other than social care within a few years.
Many town halls believe that point is fast approaching. After a decade of cuts, councils spend a fifth less than in 2010; larger councils now spend 60% of their diminished budget on adult and children’s social care, meaning other services – parks, libraries, swimming pools, Sure Start centres, fixing potholes, bus subsidies, winter road gritting, museums – have had to be eviscerated. Even Tory council leaders were in open revolt, warning that cuts have gone too far, while Tory-run Northamptonshire infamously went bankrupt. Some councils warn that they can only offer “bare legal minimum” service levels, even as they ask residents to pay more council tax up 5%. Some councils have staved off insolvency only by fire sales of property assets.
Local Authority youth services, have faced a 62% cut, from £1bn in 2008-09 to £388. More than 600 youth centres and nearly 139,000 youth service places across the UK have been axed.
Social care
Around 1.4 million adults in the UK fail to get the basic social care support they need, such as help with washing, dressing and eating, according to the charity Age UK. Rising demand from an ageing population, coupled with shrinking budgets, has led to ever tighter rationing.
Since 2010, adult social care spending in England has shrunk by £7bn, with the government averting crises with a series of “sticking plaster” funding packages.
In children’s social care, welfare cuts, soaring poverty levels and rising parental mental illness have contributed to an explosion in child protection activity. Since 2010, assessments of children at risk of harm or neglect have gone up 77%.
What has been lost. You will have seen places closed, boarded up. You will have seen and experienced the changes, not progress but regress. A total of 859 children’s centres and family hubs (which provide support services for babies, young people and families) have been closed, while 940 youth centres have been lost.
More than a fifth (21%) of public toilets have closed, with more than 835 public conveniences disappearing since the Conservatives came to power.
The number of council-subsidised bus routes has decreased by almost a third (32%), a reduction of more than 1,224 services, increasing the isolation of many living in rural communities.
More than one in five (22%) libraries have either closed, been privatised or are now staffed by volunteers. This is a decrease of 738 council-run libraries. Over the past decade there’s been a ten-fold rise in the number run by volunteers, up from 21 to 227.
Charities are taking over former public services.
Around 25% of local government jobs ‘slashed’ due to austerity. There is less public health health and consumer protection as a result.
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