Better (Local) Government

The Better Government initiative has argued in the past for a compact between central and local government to codify and reinforce the relationships between the two, overseen by a Parliamentary Committee or, as some are now arguing, an independent body on the lines of the Office for Budget Responsibility. [...] The grant was distributed so as to compensate for the variation in the spending needs of local authorities, driven by demographic and social differences, and for variation in the resources available to them driven by differences in the composition of their housing stock. [...] Various reasons have been presented to justify the variation from the basic model in recent years: • The sharpness of the accountability of the Council Tax could not be contained at local level; central rather than local government got much of the blame for increases. [...] The early indications were that the Treasury had estimated that the amount raised by Business Rates and Council Tax in future will exceed the total planned for local spending and efforts were being made to identify further services which could be transferred to local authorities to absorb the slack! Perhaps in the end it is the quantum of planned spending at the local level which is of the greates. [...] The delay in the Local Government Finance Bill gives an opportunity to do the work which has not yet been done and seek a new settlement for local government which looks afresh at the level of local service provision and how it should be funded and organised as a comprehensible and stable system for the future.