WIREDGOV

England’s most deprived areas were hit by the largest local authority spending cuts during a decade of austerity, according to new Institute for Government research.  

In a week in which elections are being held in 144 councils across England, Neighbourhood services under strain, published recently, shows how grant cuts and rising demand for social care shrunk the scope of local government in England – and exposes the lack of data in local government performance.  

With the coalition government taking little account of how dependent local authorities were on grant funding in 2010, the most grant-dependent and deprived areas such as Birmingham, Lambeth, and Salford were more likely to make deeper cuts to neighbourhood services, reducing the quality and accessibility of services.  

Key findings include: 

• The miles covered by bus routes fell 14% between 2009/10 and 2019/20, with deprived areas more likely to see reductions in routes.
• A third of England’s libraries closed in the same period, with more closures in the most deprived areas.
• Not all services declined – the overall percentage of roads in need of maintenance did not get worse between 2009/10 and 2019/20, and 37 local authorities saw an improvement in road quality during the decade.

The report also finds that variation in the performance of local services were also due to local politics and council initiatives, but a lack of key data – the government lacks information for two-thirds of neighbourhood services spending, which accounted for £10bn of local authority spending in 2019/20 – means the government is unable to truly understand why local authority performances vary.  

Graham Atkins, report author, said:  

“The Johnson government’s ambition to make more subnational data available as part of the Levelling Up agenda is laudable, but there are still big gaps in what the government knows about local service performance. If the government truly wants to understand how and why performance varies, it will have to collect new, comparable local data on the quality and accessibility of services.”

Notes for editors:

1. A link to the full report can be found on our website. 
2. The Institute for Government is an independent think tank that works to make government more effective.
3. For more information, please contact press@instituteforgovernment.org.uk / 0785 031 3791.