Oral Answers to Questions

Baroness Keeley Excerpts

Monday 7th March 2022 Commons Chamber

[Neil O’Brien]

My right hon. Friend is absolutely right; the next round of levelling-up funding will be opening shortly. He is also right to draw attention to the fact that outside the European Union we have a lot more flexibility about how we spend, and we can use that to pick up some of those exciting opportunities in other places.

[Barbara Keeley (Worsley and Eccles South) (Lab)]

3. What steps he is taking to reduce financial pressures on local authority budgets.

[Liz Twist (Blaydon) (Lab)]

6. What assessment he has made of the impact of reductions to local authority budgets on the Government’s levelling-up agenda.

[The Minister for Levelling Up Communities (Kemi Badenoch)]

Next year’s local government finance settlement makes available an additional £3.7 billion to councils, including funding for adult social care reform. This is an increase in funding of more than 4.5% in real terms and it will ensure that councils across the country have the resources they need to deliver key services.

[Barbara Keeley]

Salford City Council has had its core funding from central Government cut by 53% since 2010-11. The local government finance settlement that the Minister has just mentioned does not reverse that decade of cuts, and nor does it help enough to provide the £7.6 million needed to pay for increases in costs from national insurance, the national minimum wage, employer pensions and inflation. However, the most critical pressure is on adult social care, where the city council faces increased demand and increased costs. How on earth can councils be expected to deliver vital social care services adequately when this Government’s solution is to make councils fund them from regressive taxes such as council tax and a social care levy of up to 14%?

[Kemi Badenoch]

We recognise that councils have financial pressures and we are doing everything we can to support them. Salford receives up to an additional £19.2 million in core spending power, which is a cash-terms increase of 7.8%. That excludes other funding that we have given to the hon. Lady’s council to assist with the pressures she has raised.