Answering the Inbetweener's question

James Buckley (Jay from the Inbetweeners) wants to know why Councils keep increasing Council Tax, despite services getting poorer. He has a fair question, and [spoiler] the answer is austerity.

James Buckley (who played Jay in the Inbetweeners) wants to know why the council is taking more money off him, and doing less, and says that people up and down the country are asking the same thing.

Here’s the clip, from the Buckley’s YouTube podcast he does with his wife (excuse the strong language):

There were a number of derisory comments beneath the clip where I found it on social media, but in reality the guy has a point, and a valid question.

Why does Council Tax keep going up, while councils keep doing less?

The simple answer is austerity.

According to the Special Interest Group of Municipal Authorities (SIGOMA), between 2010 and 2024 the Tories slashed £13.9 billion from local government funding, with the heaviest cuts aimed at London and deprived urban and post-industrial (Labour voting) areas, while several wealthy (Tory voting) areas were hit with relatively tiny funding cuts in comparison, while Wokingham even got a nice little increase.

Loads of local governments, especially in the north and midlands, have been hammered with real terms funding cuts of over 40%, causing severe economic pressures, with the average local government area losing almost a fifth of their funding.

The fact that many wealthy Tory areas ended up with cuts a tenth as dramatic as poorer Labour areas in the north made an absolute mockery of Cameron and Osborne’s insistence that "we’re all in this together".

Aside from flogging off publicly owned buildings and land to property developers (asset stripping themselves), these vast Tory funding cuts left councils with only two real options to try and balance the books. Increase the amount they raise in taxation by as much as they could get away with, and cut back on services.

Statutory services (education, child and adult social care, waste collection, planning + housing services) are protected, which means that stuff like youth clubs, outreach programmes, park maintenance, libraries, grass cutting, street lighting, public toilets, leisure facilities, etc ended up getting chucked into the Tory austerity shredding machine.

Why do swathes of the country look like they’re falling apart at the seams now? Because savage Tory austerity cuts left local governments no choice but to abandon local services, and leave things to neglect.

Despite all of the asset stripping; Council Tax hikes; and service reductions, one in five councils are still on the brink of going bust.

Another factor to add into the equation is the ageing population and increasing demands on adult social care services.

Councils can’t just abandon the growing number of elderly people in need because the Tories slashed their funding to bits. It wouldn’t just be immoral to do so, it’s also not permissible, because social care is one of the statutory services they’re not allowed to cut, even if they go bust.

There’s a strong argument for bringing care services into the NHS, but the public rejected that option twice when Corbyn’s Labour proposed it in 2017 and 2019, in favour of forcing their own austerity-wracked, cash-strapped councils to continue covering the costs.

There’s also a strong argument for Labour to reverse the Tory austerity cuts to local government funding, and to strongly incentivise councils to invest in social housing in order to generate guaranteed revenue streams for the future. Unfortunately Labour refuses to do this because Rachel Reeves is just as addicted to the economic insanity of austerity penny-pinching as her Tory predecessors.

Given the dire financial situation so many councils are in as a result of Tory austerity, the lack of remaining public property to asset strip, and the increasing costs of providing statutory adult care services, it’s surprising that more councils haven’t gone bust already (twelve since 2010, as compared to just one in all the time before 2000).

One of the simplest ways for councils to cut expenditure is to reduce bin collections from weekly to fortnightly, and if they can raise a bit of extra revenue by demanding payment for stuff like organic waste collection, they’re going to do that too.

So, if like Jay from the Inbetweeners, you’re angry that your local council is reducing and/or paywalling your bin collections, even though your Council Tax bills keep going up, the people to blame are the Westminster establishment cabal.

Primarily the architect of brutal Tory local government austerity cutbacks; George Osborne. But also all of his successors as Chancellor, who have outright refused to undo the damage he did to our local communities, including Rachel Reeves.