News story

17th January 2002

MP to lead debate on "grossly underfunded" Council

Northavon MP Steve Webb will next week lead a debate at Westminster on the funding rules which have, for many years, made South Gloucestershire one of the worst-funded councils in the country. On Tuesday (22nd January) the Lib Dem MP will challenge Local Government Minister Alan Whitehead in a debate which he has secured on the subject of the “Standard Spending Assessment for South Gloucestershire”.

The Standard Spending Assessment (or SSA) is the amount that Government thinks a Council needs to spend to provide a standard level of service. In order to maintain standards in schools and social services, South Gloucestershire Council has been forced since it was created to spend systematically more than the SSA, and the excess has to be met by local council taxpayers. When the Council was first formed in the mid 1990s, part of this gap was cushioned by the using the reserves that the Council inherited from the former Avon authority. Now that those reserves have been exhausted, the Council faces a choice between a significant council tax rise, or cuts in services.

On Monday, Steve Webb will hold a meeting with South Gloucestershire
Council officials in order to pore over the fine detail of the Council’s budget so that he can present the strongest possible case to the Minister
on Tuesday. As well as calling for a re-think by the Government on funding for 2002-03, the MP will also urge that the Government gets on
with its plans to reform council funding, due in 2003-04. He will urge that if councils such as South Gloucestershire do significantly better out of the new system, they should get those gains at once and not have to wait while they are phased in over a period of many years.

Speaking in advance of the debate, Steve Webb said:

“Many local people are quite rightly unhappy at the prospect of a significant council tax rise, and I know that councillors too object to the annual pressure either to cut services or raise the council tax. None of this would be necessary if we had a fair system of funding local councils. That is why I will be challenging those responsible — Government ministers — to get on with reforming this unfair system. The people of South Gloucestershire have been at the end of the queue for Government money for too long, and I will be telling the minister that we have had enough”.

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