A "better deal" for Southampton?
February 2011
This year Southampton will receive its worst funding deal from central government in our city’s history.
In November, the Conservative Government announced that Southampton would lose nearly £12 million in funding for local Council services. That’s a cut of over 10% – the worst in Southampton’s history as a unitary authority.
This came just a few short months after Conservatives were running a General Election campaign on the slogan of “a better deal for Southampton.”
Some other neighbouring Councils were protected from such a severe reduction in spending. The Government’s own figures show that Southampton faces a cut 4 times the scale of Hampshire’s and more than twice as much as Sussex. Extraordinarily, Dorset even sees its grant from Government increase!
The trend is the same across the country. Towns and cities like Southampton are being hammered with deeper cuts, while shire counties have had their budgets protected.
And this is not the only way in which current government methods for allocating funding are biased against places like Southampton.
The Government has set up a new ‘incentive scheme’ to encourage local authorities to build new homes. The way it works is that money paid from Council rents goes into a central pot, which is then paid back to Councils according to how many new homes are built in their area over a set time.
It’s sold as a way of giving Councils an incentive to build new homes. The problem is that places that already have a lot of Council homes – like Southampton – will pay most of the costs. And dense, urban areas- like Southampton – will get far less back from the scheme than rural authorities with more space to build.
According to the government’s own figures, Southampton will lose £98,000 in the first year under this new system, rising to a £2 million Council tax black hole over the following five years. That money will instead go to leafier, wealthier areas.
Of course there are many different ideas of what constitutes a good society, or fairness, or justice.
But I am afraid to say I cannot see any possible way of describing these new funding deals as a “better deal” for Southampton.
Whatever your view on what is the right scale and pace of deficit reduction; whatever your views on whether it’s better to tackle the deficit through spending cuts alone or through a combination of targeted cuts and economic growth; surely we can all agree that any system that takes money away from cities like ours with high levels of deprivation, and gives that money instead to wealthier towns and villages is not, by any reasonable definition, “better.” Or fair. Or just.
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