£4 billion black hole in local authority budgets

[sherlock]

Reports this morning that it would cost £4 billion a year to properly fund councils and avoid drastic cuts to services.

Surely that is chicken feed in the grand scheme of things?

Dido Harding waltzed off with £35 billion from Test and Trace.

The proposed Inheritance Tax cuts would cost £8 billion a year.

The fact that the Tories are choosing not to address this local government crisis is clearly a policy choice and absolutely nothing to do with affordability.

 

[h_m_boro]

£4bn.....sounds like as massive asset sale at ridiculously knocked down prices will be furiously getting sorted in the next few months.

Wonder who will buy them........

 

[sherlock]

£4bn.....sounds like as massive asset sale at ridiculously knocked down prices will be furiously getting sorted in the next few months.

Wonder who will buy them........

True.

Regardless of the motivation for that sale of assets, it can only be a one off 'solution' anyway.

Can't sell the assets twice.

 

[JonnyHistory]

It's been a deliberate gradual run down of local government.

First they add the statutory burden of social care ect to ever decreasing budgets. They they keep underfunding which means councils have to strip back services the bare minimum and now the January asset sales for their capitalist mates begins.

Redcar alone are 50 million a year down compared to 2010 on their budget. 50 million! And yet Clarke and Young still claim budgets are up each year. It's effing criminal.

Tories wanted a small state, that's what austerity has been all about and that's what this underfunding of councils is about also. It's ideological and cruel.

 

[newusername]

Dido Harding waltzed off with £35 billion from Test and Trace.

Over two years & didn't spend it all, that was just the budget allocated for it.

 

[sherlock]

Over two years & didn't spend it all, that was just the budget allocated for it.

What point are you making?

 

[JonnyHistory]

Over two years & didn't spend it all, that was just the budget allocated for it.

It was allocated though wasn't it!? So they found money for that (despite cheaper alternatives being available) yet they can't find money to fund councils properly.

They are touting (as another poster said here earlier) an 8 billion tax cut on inheritance tax, which is annual btw .. half of that would plug the black hole but their priorities are tax cuts for their mates not helping society as a whole.

They are shameless and your 'point' does little to counter that.

 

[h_m_boro]

Its ideological and cruel.

But that's Tory modus operandi isn't it? Elected to govern the country but only interested in personal gain and wealth. And their mates too, obviously.

The Working classes are idle, sponging scum and all "handouts" must be stripped away at any cost. But, if it's white collar corruption costing the country billions, that's different as they went to the right school and wore the right tie.

I worked in Local Government through the 90s and looking back the Tory government then didn't even come close to being the absolute set of monstrous b*stards the current lot are.