Restore local council funding to 2010 levels, adjusted for inflation

It is difficult to have a sensible conversation about the quality of local services when the funding that underpins those services has been cut by nearly 40% in real terms since 2010. Councils are not failing because they are badly run, though some certainly are, but because they have been asked to do more with dramatically less for over a decade and the mathematics of that situation has finally caught up with reality.

I would propose restoring central government funding for local authorities to 2010 levels, adjusted for inflation and population growth, phased in over a three-year period. This would not solve every problem, but it would allow councils to reopen libraries, maintain roads, fund social care properly, and provide the kind of basic services that people rightly expect from the taxes they pay.

The alternative is to continue pretending that councils can deliver services on a budget that everyone involved knows is insufficient, which benefits nobody except those who would prefer local government to fail so they can argue for its abolition.