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This article by Green Councillor for St George West Rob Bryher was originally published on Bristol 24/7 on February 22nd 2025.
Five days after a general election that had returned a Labour landslide and our city’s first Green MP, Bristol’s full council meeting heard a motion that I and my Green councillor colleagues Lisa Stone and Lorraine Francis tabled: ‘Ending local government austerity and investing in local public services’
We’d spent years watching children’s services, adult social care and housing budgets being decimated and we’d had enough. The motion was approved by Greens, Labour and Liberal Democrats, with only the Tories voting against.
The motion noted that UK government grants to local authorities were cut by over 40 per cent in real terms between 2009/10 and 2019/20.
Local Government Association analysis shows that service spending in 2022/23 was 42.1 per cent lower than it would have been had service spend moved in line with cost and demand pressures since 2010/11. This means that councils have been forced to make £24.5bn in service cuts and efficiencies over this period.
The motion called for a substantial investment in local government and public services. Given that the motion’s actions included writing to Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves and that it contained the line “the Labour Party has not committed to increasing funding for local authorities”, it was a slight surprise that Bristol’s Labour councillors chose to back it, but I thanked them at the time for doing so.
So what has happened since then in terms of the Labour government backing this call for proper investment in local government?
Just before Christmas, the UK Labour government announced its Local Government Financial Settlement. Sadly, although spending did slightly increase, it is nowhere near enough to cover Bristol’s £52m deficit that the outgoing Labour administration has left us with locally. In real terms, the increase is actually lower than the Conservative government gave the city in the last two financial years.
As Green Party co-leader Adrian Ramsay said at the time: “The funding settlement is barely enough to keep councils ticking over. It does very little to ease the underlying financial stresses that local authorities are facing after years of rising costs around social care, special educational needs and reduced government grants… this latest funding round deprives councils of the means to deliver quality services for all.”
At the national level, Greens would do things differently. We know low and middle income earners are hurting amidst the cost of living crisis and we want measures to address this by improving schools, adult social care and conditions in our council housing.
We would tax wealth and prudentially borrow in order to fund services we all rely on. This isn’t rocket science or some secretive plan – we openly said this during the general election campaign last year. The Institute for Fiscal Studies stated this increase in taxes by more than £170bn per year would fund a £160bn boost to day-to-day public spending.
The real question isn’t ‘Can we afford it?’ but instead ‘Who seriously thinks we cannot afford it and that it isn’t necessary?’
We’d also fundamentally change the dynamic around local taxation. We need to reform local government taxation to an updated and progressive system that addresses problems inherent in the current one. Council tax is based on the value of homes on April 1 1991 – a bizarre situation.
Greens have been championing the retention of the Council Tax Reduction scheme since 2016 to protect the most vulnerable, and have successfully campaigned to protect it. We continue to prioritise the scheme and will do all we can, but have been clear that will be very hard (impossible) without the government giving funding for this benefit.
We want to see a local taxation system that generates more revenue from those who can pay it – from those who own substantial amounts of land. We would give local authorities the powers to levy an additional local Land Value Tax and keep the proceeds locally.
As a result of decreased funding and increased demand for services, since 2021 at least six local authorities have declared themselves effectively bankrupt, with many councils, including Bristol, warning they may have to do the same.
Although we have worked hard to find the savings needed to keep the council from such measures, this is not a tenable position for us or many councils. The budget that we proposed for consideration by full council on February 25 is set within this political context. We simply do not have powers to radically increase revenues to fill the deficit.
There’s a line of thinking from some on the left of politics that refusing to set a budget will in some way “send a message” to national actors, that the headlines resulting from such a move would embarrass them into properly resourcing local government properly.
This stems from the precedent of the 1985 rate-capping rebellion where 15 councils refused to set budgets in an attempt to force Thatcher’s government to intervene directly to provide local services or to concede the issue and fund services properly.
While Liverpool City Council did secure £20m for housing the year before this, they eventually set a legal budget and all 15councils which initially refused to set a rate eventually did so, and the campaign failed to change government policy.
These powers to restrict council budgets have remained in place ever since and we can’t take this risk in Bristol. For those councils who have got into an even bigger financial problem than Bristol is in, the UK government has come in, manhandled their budget and made even more ruthless cuts. This is without any public scrutiny or accountability on whichever political party or parties is currently elected locally.
As a Bristol councillor, I want spending decisions to be made inside the city, informed by Bristol voters – not by Whitehall bureaucrats with spreadsheets.
Sadly, in the last period, we have seen local Labour councillors and Bristol’s Labour MPs decide to attack budgetary options put forward to check with the public what they feel would or wouldn’t be acceptable. Checking with the public what they feel would or wouldn’t be acceptable is how budget scrutiny should work.
I would politely suggest that those Labour MPs could better expend their energy on lobbying their party colleagues Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves to bring more funding to Bristol and other local authorities.
There are still some very important services and projects being funded through the budget. You can read the Green Party’s budget proposals here.
We are left with a very simple approach for all those who want good public services locally: campaign for a better local government funding settlement from the UK Labour government, and do our best to be creative with the funding we do have and to limit cuts on local public services as much as we possibly can.