Despite councils’ best efforts to protect services, the financial challenges they face from rising cost and demand pressures are having a marked impact on service provision.
For example, spending is concentrated on fewer people, as councils have protected services such as social care (adult and children’s) where there are clearly defined statutory responsibilities and regulatory oversight.
There has been a reduction in spending on preventative services, despite growing evidence of their financial and social benefits. For instance, reductions in spending on preventative services for adolescents is highly correlated with rising rates of 16 and 17-year-olds entering care.
And there are growing concerns over the quality and scale of service provision.
The LGA’s triannual residents’ satisfaction surveys show that the share of respondents who are satisfied with council service provision has fallen for every service area in the survey between 2016/17 and 2023/24, except for waste collection.
Satisfaction levels for key services such as street cleaning, road maintenance, pavement maintenance, library services and sport and leisure have all fallen by between 5 and 9 percentage points since 2016/17, despite all the hard work of councils.
This matters because it is these and other neighbourhood (and often non-statutory) services that make a difference not just to individual people’s lives, but to public services and economic growth more widely.
Sport and cultural services boost productivity and reduce pressure on the NHS and social care service by helping people to manage their conditions independently; library business and intellectual property centres reach new groups of entrepreneurs and create more sustainable businesses than other forms of start-up support.
The LGA believes it is a false economy – locally and nationally – to reduce councils to just the providers of statutory services by not adequately funding them.
Additional government support is needed urgently to ensure local financial and service sustainability. The LGA, as the national voice of local government working on behalf of councils of all parties, tiers and regions, will continue to lobby the Chancellor on these matters right up to the Spring Budget, on 6 March.
