Nearly 60% of English Local Council’s spending is now focused on Social Care Services.

Tuesday, November 19, 2019

The Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) have recently released their first annual report: English local government funding: trends and challenges in 2019 and beyond.

This report, looks in detail at councils’ revenues and spending, focusing on the trends and choices taken over the last decade; looks at the outlook for local government funding both in the short and longer term and it looks at the impact of the Business Rates Retention Scheme (BRRS) and New Homes Bonus (NHB) on different councils’ funding so far, to see whether there are lessons to guide reforms to these policies.

Amongst its findings were that Councils’ spending is increasingly focused on social care services – now 57% of all service budgets.This reflects the fact that councils have cut what they spend themselves on housing, transport, planning, and cultural and leisure services by 40% or more per person in order to limit cuts to social care services – although income from fees and charges means overall spending on these services has not fallen quite so much. As a result, spending per person on acute children’s social care services is budgeted to be 2% higher than in 2009–10, and will probably be even higher given councils have overspent relative to budgets by 8% on average over the last four years.”

To read the full findings of this report click here: https://www.ifs.org.uk/publications/14563