EAMONN O'BRIEN: Councils needs more than small one off pots of money

With more and more local authorities effectively declaring bankruptcy, it is hard to ignore the growing crisis in the sector.

Equally, with an increasing number of residents now paying more in council tax but getting less back in services, the burden on local taxpayers is hard to ignore too.

As I’ve said many times before in my remarks on this subject, the system is broken and we are all paying the price for the Conservative government’s culpability in this and failure to fix it.

And to be clear, one off pots of money that only temporarily cover about four per cent of our budget gap will not fix it.

This is why we’ve been running our campaign that calls on all of us to come together, fix what we can locally and lobby for changes nationally.

Our “Let’s Fix It Together” campaign shines a spotlight on the ways in which the current crisis is showing itself and our priority areas for reform.

Bury Council leader, Cllr Eamonn O'Brien (Image: Eamonn O'Brien)

Children’s social care and SEND provision is a clear one.

The current way of working far too often fails everyone involved.

Just this week, England’s Children’s Commissioner, Baroness Rachel de Souza, slammed the “obscene” profits being made by private providers in this space and highlighted how some private providers charge councils about £1m a year for only one child.

While this is extreme, it is not unusual to see placement costs numbering in the hundreds of thousands, often without any discernible benefit to the young person.

This brings me back to why the system is broken.

Even if these costs were fair and necessary, how can we fund this sustainably?

Right now, our central option would be to raise council tax.

But to put this in context, a one per cent rise in Bury raises the council about £1m extra each year.

In theory therefore, it would take only a handful of additional children with complex needs to draw down this extra cash.

But in reality, what we actually have to cover is not only extra demand on children’s social care, but adult’s social care too.

Our adult services bill is actually far bigger than our children’s services one too.

Plus, the overall cost of inflation on prices, energy and wages across the whole council.

So if council tax alone doesn’t cover it, where can we find it? The next option is cuts to services.

An alternative, of course, is fairer funding from central government and this is why our campaign is so important.

Please take the time to go on our campaign page and sign up.