Original Post >> Birmingham Against the Cuts

The powers of Councils are declining for two reasons: Government cuts in their budgets, and the increased powers of Mayoral Combined Authorities over Councils, which will cover the whole of England, and which have only one directly elected member, the Mayor. This represents a further stage in the ongoing neoliberalisation of local government in England.

There has been a massive 41% cut in government funding over a decade, while demand for services has grown. According to Unison “there is a funding gap of £4.25bn for 2025/26 and a cumulative funding gap of £8.45bn by 2026/27”. This chronic underfunding, coupled with rising demand and costs (inflation, equal pay claims), has pushed many councils towards financial crisis, with some issuing Section 114 notices (bankruptcy), creating £4bn funding gaps, and threatening essential services for vulnerable residents. Birmingham, of course, has been especially hard hit.

According to a 2024 report by the Institute for Financial Studies:

2. Taking the period 2010–11 to 2024–25 as a whole, councils’ overall core funding is set to be 9% lower in real terms and 18% lower in real terms per person this year than at the start of the 2010s. The reduction is set to be larger for councils serving deprived areas (e.g. 26% per person for the most deprived tenth) than for the less deprived areas (e.g. 11% for the least deprived tenth). Acute services continue to be a major driver of spending, with user numbers growing and costs outpacing general inflation. For example, the number of children in secure units and children’s homes and the number with Education, Health and Care plans both increased by over 30% between early 2020 and early 2023, while the number of homeless households in B&Bs doubled between the end of 2019 and September 2023. The cost per placement in children’s homes increased by 20% between 2019–20 and 2022–23, while the cost of care home placements for adults aged 65 or over increased by 35% between 2019–20 and 2023–24 – in both cases almost double whole-economy inflation measured over the same periods. 

5. Acute services continue to be a major driver of spending, with user numbers growing and costs outpacing general inflation. For example, the number of children in secure units and children’s homes and the number with Education, Health and Care plans both increased by over 30% between early 2020 and early 2023, while the number of homeless households in B&Bs doubled between the end of 2019 and September 2023. The cost per placement in children’s homes increased by 20% between 2019–20 and 2022–23, while the cost of care home placements for adults aged 65 or over increased by 35% between 2019–20 and 2023–24 – in both cases almost double whole-economy inflation measured over the same periods.

The powers of Combined Authorities are increasing

The Local Government Information Unit’s report “Looking to 2050: The future of local government in England” says “The Government’s new Devolution and Community Empowerment Bill aims to create two layers of local government across the whole of England: local Councils, and above them everywhere, strategic mayoral authorities, each including a number of local authority areas.” Each will be led by an elected Mayor, as in the WMCA. Existing mayors have key powers, including controlling transport funding, managing adult education budgets, influencing housing/land use, running business support, and accessing single investment funds for growth.

The new English Devolution and Community Empowerment Bill sets out provisions for a new “Strategic Authority” (SA), which will have the ability to perform functions in the following areas:

• transport and local infrastructure
• skills and employment support
• housing and strategic planning
• economic development and regeneration
• environment and net zero
• health, wellbeing and public service reform
• public safety

The Government proposes that there will be three “levels” of devolution:

• Foundation – authorities without an elected mayor – limited devolution
• Mayoral – authorities with an elected mayor – greater devolution
• Established Mayoral – mayoral authorities which satisfy additional governance requirements – broadest range of devolved powers and functions, and an ability to request further devolved powers from central government – the criteria is set out in the White Paper.

And as Caitlin Webb reported in the Local Government Chronicle on 10 July this year, “Mayors to gain further powers to intervene in council decisions”. “The government has set out plans to grant mayors extra powers to intervene in decisions currently made by local authorities. The English Devolution & Community Empowerment Bill, published this afternoon, outlines how mayors could be entrusted with controls over transport decisions on key route networks,…”.

Caitlin Webb adds that “In a radical move, the Bill allows for an Elected Mayor to appoint up to 7 “commissioners” each of which is only able to work in one of the “areas of competence”, and who are not members of the Authority. Mayors will determine their portfolios and will be able to delegate some functions to them. This of course raises questions about unelected officials undertaking public functions and will be an interesting area moving forward.”

As Mark Sandford and Zoë Billingham say in their IPPR report Accountability matters: Securing the future of devolution (8 May 2025), “The system of mayoral accountability currently in existence is complex and broad, but yet also manages to be insufficient to keep up with the developing power of mayoral authorities.” (p6)

“With increasing power, however, comes a greater need for scrutiny.”

This is a quote from an Institute for Government report on 12 March 2025. Here are some extracts:

4. WHAT IS MISSING FROM THE CURRENT MAYORAL ACCOUNTABILITY SYSTEM?

To advance the terms of debate around mayoral accountability in England and open the door to alternative and more expansive understandings of accountability, we need to understand what is not working.

A. MAYORAL AUTHORITIES’ ‘ACCOUNTABILITY’ SHOULD BE MORE CLEARLY DEFINED

The ‘Westminster model’ values strong majoritarian, power-hoarding governance. (p10)

B. THE RESOURCING OF ACCOUNTABILITY LOCALLY AND REGIONALLY IS INSUFFICIENT

The accountability system set out in the English Devolution Accountability Framework comprises three arms: accountability to local overview and scrutiny, accountability to the public and accountability to government. (p11)

By comparison, overview and scrutiny committees have no dedicated resource and have struggled for influence. (p12)

But overall, as Newman et al (2024) note, “at the heart of this system is the assumption that accountability is about spending public money, rather than broader notions of being democratically accountable or accountable for wide societal outcomes”. (p12)

C. PLACE-BASED LEADERSHIP IS UNACKNOWLEDGED

D. OVERVIEW AND SCRUTINY IS WEAK

Fourth, while demands for upward accountability persist, local structures remain weak. Most mayoral authorities’ overview and scrutiny committees have never undertaken an investigation into a mayoral policy or a matter of local interest, in the manner of a parliamentary select committee. They normally have minimal staff capacity and therefore cannot monitor and highlight unusual patterns of spending or questionable decision-making.

Despite onerous, multi-layered reporting and assurance procedures, mayors could come to be described as ‘unaccountable’. (p13}

“CENTRALISATION, LOCAL DECLINE AND THE FUTURE OF COMMUNITY POWER”

 That is the title of a Localis paper by Callin McLinden, 22 July 2025, which is worth quoting extracts from at some length.

Introduction

Across England, a quiet, corrosive crisis of governance has been unfolding. Communities are fraying considerably—not only from the compounding, lasting pressures of austerity, stagnant wages, and hollowed-out public services, but from something less tangible and insidious if not pushed back against with meaningful legislative reform. This is an increasingly pervasive sense that power has drifted almost completely out of their hands. Local high streets decline, bus routes vanish, and councils continue to stagger under the weight of impossible budgets and social care responsibilities, while those most affected are offered little recourse or redress. The result is a growing democratic deficit, one felt most acutely in neighbourhoods that lack even the illusion of agency. (p2)

The latest vessel for such populist energy is the Reform party, which has tapped into this disaffection with a simple, resonant, and increasingly effective narrative: the UK is broken and the political class could not care less. The discontent at the core of their rise is not arbitrary, it is the direct outcome of decades of overtly centralised governance cloaked in the rhetoric of localism. Slogans like ‘levelling up’ and ‘taking back control’ have promised empowerment but delivered only management. At best, reforms towards deepening local democracy have been slow, top-down, and overly bureaucratic and technical. At worst, they have functioned as camouflage for continued central control and the decline of local material conditions through austerity.

What I’d like to argue here is that without meaningful statutory provisions for double devolution, ones that enshrine pathways for communities (and indeed residents in isolation) to influence both local and national decision-making, this sense of disenfranchisement will only deepen. Democratic renewal in England must begin not with more managerialism from Whitehall or delegating such managerialism to an abstract network of regional governance, but with the tangible and, given the increasingly ‘pressure cooker’ nature of disenfranchisement within communities; radical empowerment of communities themselves. (p3)

1. Done to, not with: recent history

Successive governments have recognised the rising tide of popular discontent and responded, less with reform than with rhetoric. The slogans of recent years (“take back control”, “levelling up”) have not described a genuine redistribution of power but rather disguised its retention. The language of empowerment has too often served as a smokescreen for a deeper entrenchment of central authority. (p4)

Community empowerment: the current approach 

The localist legacy of the fourteen years leading up to 2024 is clearest in the proliferation of combined authorities and directly elected mayors through devolution deals and the establishment of integrated funding settlements. These mechanisms, while useful in administrative terms, offer no systemic route for residents to shape policy directly. (p6)

More recent policy developments, including the Plan for Neighbourhoods and the introduction of trailblazer neighbourhoods, do suggest a cautious but notable shift in the government’s approach to neighbourhood level empowerment. (p7)

Yet the architecture remains incomplete. While the English Devolution and Community Empowerment bill is a welcome addition to the devolution agenda, there are still no general statutory requirements within the bill for strategic authorities (or indeed any local authorities) to meaningfully engage communities or residents directly, with specific community empowerment provisions limited to a more expansive definition of ‘assets of community value’ and the admittedly very welcome introduction of the ‘Community Right to Buy’. For talk of ‘giving communities the tools they need to deliver growth’, there is a distinct lack of guarantees to this end within the bill. Without such guarantees, a shift from national to regional management may merely redraw the map of centralisation; a network of Whitehalls, if you will. (p8)

The consequences of central control 

The effects of such persistent centralisation are not abstract, they are lived, visible, and becoming increasingly corrosive. Across England, local governance is no longer experienced as stewardship but rather as managed decline punctuated by outright imposition. Over a decade’s worth of relentless austerity has seen councils carry the burden of statutory duties without the autonomy or resource base to meet them. As a result, high streets have deteriorated, bus routes have vanished, libraries and youth centres gone from neighbourhoods—each shuttered building ultimately a policy decision made elsewhere. But the damage runs deeper than infrastructure and material conditions. This system of centralised control, and the intensification of appropriating systemic critiques in rhetoric but delivering little in practice, has worn away people’s sense of political efficacy. Decisions are made in rooms they cannot enter, through processes they have no influence over, in an overtly bureaucratic, public management language they are not familiar with. Over time, participation wanes, not because of apathy alone but because of exhaustion with the assumed capacity expected of them to exercise any of their currently ascribed community rights.

The post-2010 turn toward community-led delivery, asset transfers and volunteer-run services was particularly egregious in its outsourcing of responsibility without transferring power or building capacity. It instead presumed capacity without investing in it, with neighbourhoods becoming administrative zones rather than political spaces, stripped of the sort of civic engagement that sustains a sense of local agency by residents and communities. When residents are invoked and asked to engage but the barriers to engagement are so high and still nothing changes, disillusionment is not irrational—it’s an inevitability. (pp9-10)

The collapse of the traditional vote

Into the void left by Westminster’s democratic neglect steps a new insurgency. Reform UK’s local electoral success in 2025, securing over 40 percent of contested local seats and eclipsing both Labour and the Conservatives in overall vote share, speaks to a volatile hunger for disruption to politics as usual. (p11)

3. Conclusion: From delegation to democracy

The centralised governance model that has defined England since at least the 1990s is not simply inefficient, it has become corrosive. It has delivered institutional incoherence, economic stagnation, and a pervasive democratic malaise. Most crucially, it has bred a slow-burning civic despair: a sense that power has never been so remote, unresponsive, and indifferent to the everyday texture of neighbourhood life. Politics, for many, is no longer participatory, but something done to them, by those far away, coveted in bureaucratic language not their own. (p23)

What is at stake is more than just Labour’s political legitimacy, it is the very idea that democracy lives close to home, residing in councils, places, and neighbourhoods. Without such a renewal, there is a serious risk of ceding the future to those who offer rage in place of results. Thus, the path to kick the can down is running out and England now stands at a fork. One direction leads back toward a technocratic centre, potentially efficient, procedural, but ultimately hollow and disenfranchising people en masse. The other leads outward: to neighbourhoods, participation, to a democracy lived as something tangible and shared. The first is well-worn and crumbling, while the second remains underbuilt, full of promise. But it is only in the second direction that renewal can take hold.” (p24)

What structures and processes of local government – at regional and local levels – can best serve working-class interests in England today?

It is clear that the increasing powers of Mayoral Combined Authorities, now to be England-wide, are being met with forceful criticisms by community and public service organisations concerned with researching and lobbying local government. But they do not go far enough to address and answer fundamental class issues. We need structured democratic citizen power not only to hold Combined Authorities to account but to shape their policies. Part 2 of this BATC article will consider some answers. It will be posted on BATC at the beginning of January 2026.

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