Local government cuts: housing services have been hit hardest
This very interesting article suggests that the impact of local authority cuts on our rural communities is pinching hardest around the housing agenda. It tells us:
Two of the government’s highest priority policies related to housing are suffering most from spending cuts: housing welfare support and planning and development.
Over the five years of this parliament, spending by local authorities on housing-related services will have fallen in real terms by a third. This doesn’t include council housing, which is now self-financing. But the remaining housing services have seen a far bigger cut than applies to council spending overall. Excluding housing benefit payments, English councils will spend 16% less in real terms in 2014/15 than they did in 2010/11, but housing’s cut is more than twice that, at 34%.
Housing welfare support has been cut by nearly half in real terms over the past five years (46%). This was what housing professionals warned would happen when the government ended the ring-fence that protected Supporting People funds. Given that welfare spending uses up half of councils’ housing expenditure, it was bound to take a big hit. The consequences, however, have been seen in more rough sleeping, the closure of women’s refuges and a host of other impacts on the most vulnerable.
The budget for planning and development has also been cut by 46%. We don’t know where the cuts have fallen, but it’s very likely that both strategic planning and development control (which deals with planning applications) have been cut substantially. This carries two messages for government: one is that developers may be at least partially right when they point to delays in the planning system for holding up new housing development; the other is that it’s unfair to blame local authorities when the cuts are imposed by central government. It also raises a question: shouldn’t more of the cost of planning services be borne by fees for planning applications?