Many UK councils facing financial meltdown: What are the governments plans to save our services?

Massive debts force many UK councils to slash services. Will your area be affected?

Transcript

00:00Well, councils have, like the rest of us, got to sort of make their funding sort of

00:05stretch to whatever the sort of needs are. Now of course, as we all know, we experience

00:10times when inflation sort of runs away with our spending power, and of course we then

00:14have to sort of reduce. Councils are in an even worse position because of course they've

00:19actually sort of suffered from inflation, but more particularly the sort of the largest

00:23amount of sort of funding they get is from the government, the so-called capital grant,

00:26and that varies across the piece. But if I sort of say or tell you that on average that's

00:33gone down since 2010 when the sort of Conservatives first got in and instituted austerity by an

00:38average of 60%, which is phenomenal. So you imagine that in the last 14 years, your income

00:45had gone down by 60%. You really would be sort of in difficulties.

00:50Labour would say that it's the previous administration's fault that we're in this situation. What are

00:54they planning to do to resolve this issue?

00:57Well, I mean, every government that comes in will always blame the last lot. Yeah, Labour's

01:02answer of course is quite clearly that they recognise that there are difficulties and

01:06there are sort of big, big problems with sort of public service provision. But of course,

01:11as we said earlier, the sort of the current Labour government make great claims about

01:15the fact that there is very little money about. In fact, there are sort of huge holes that

01:18they've got to fill. Hence the fact we've got the whole aspect of sort of money having

01:22to come from sort of employers, national insurance and other sort of means such as

01:26inheritance tax.

01:27The big issue you said was care provision. Can you see a future perhaps where that's

01:31removed from councils and funded centrally or funded in a different way?

01:36Councils are getting stretched every which way. And the difficulty is as our sort of

01:40ageing population sort of pays less in, and of course, they have to then have pension

01:43which of course comes from central government, there is less money in the system. But of

01:48course, what they sort of know is that sort of the expectation is increasing, and their

01:53ability to provide that sort of expectation is decreasing. So yeah, everyone is pretty

01:57sort of dissatisfied with the current level.