By 2020 Walsall Council will be getting virtually no support from the Government. The Council will have to rely on local council tax and business rates to provide the funding for our local services. Theresa May’s Government will have virtually washed its hands of all responsibility for supporting local services. Their grant funding to local councils which is used to pay for your bin collections, school crossing patrols, libraries, social workers, foster parents, street cleaning, road repairs and much, much more will have been removed entirely!

In the last quarter of 2016 Theresa May’s Tory Government made two important financial statements. The first in November was the Autumn Statement, (that’s the second of the two big economic statements made by the government every year – the first being the Budget which happens in the Spring) and then in December we had the Local Government Settlement (that’s the annual determination of funding to local government from the Government at Westminster). Search as you may there was no mention of any extra help for the struggling NHS and Social Care without which all other services are at risk.

Oh sure the Communities Secretary, Sajid Javid has said he has made an extra £900m available for social care over the next two years to help plug the social care gap. But this will be achieve by forcing local councils to raise Council Tax by 6% over the next two years to pay for it, something the Government had already decided to do over the next three years anyway. So this isn’t new money and it’s not coming from the Government it’s straight out of your pockets and passing the blame onto councils.      

However the Tories did manage to find £6.7billion in tax breaks to business, and let’s not forget the Inheritance Tax and Capital Gains Tax relief that has been handed out. So much for the pledge to help those that Theresa May said she wanted to help, those that were just about managing. 

Going it alone should not mean that we should give up on the people of Walsall. The new coalition administration needs to put in place the changes that will necessarily change the way in which the council delivers its services in order to make the best use of the diminishing resources it will have.

Last week Walsall’s Labour/Liberal Democrat administration’s Cabinet met to review, as promised, the results of the consultation which began back in October. They will now do what they can to incorporate some of the alternative views you have put forward in your responses. At the same time they will be trying to shield the most vulnerable in the borough from the effects of continuing austerity measures from the government. The aim will be to target what resources we have to where they will have the biggest impact.

It’s a tough challenge but one we feel that must be taken. For to long Walsall has lurched from one year to the next without getting to grips with the changes needed to transform the way the council works with its partners to ensure every penny we have is spent wisely.