Responding to the publication today of the funding settlement for local government, Plymouth City Council Leader Tudor Evans, said: “After years of the Government reducing funding for local government, we are used to having low expectations from the annual settlement, so we are not surprised that this one is not all that the headlines promise.
“As always, the devil is in the detail and while it is presented as an increase in funding for councils, the reality of the provisional settlement is that it falls very short of getting anywhere close to addressing the chronic problems the entire sector is facing as years of underfunding are compounded by big rises in costs and demand pressures in providing social care and temporary accommodation.
“And the fact is that it reduces Plymouth’s Service Grant – a key component of our core funding – from £2.35 million to £371,000, which is an 84 per cent cut.
“It also ignores the impact on residents of the cost of living crisis as the Government is assuming that to raise spending power to help cover the massive additional costs we are fall facing, councils will increase Council Tax by the maximum amount allowed. They are again attempting to deflect blame onto councils for its own failure to properly support local services.
“And once again this is a one-off settlement, making it impossible for us to plan properly for future years and it is again failing to deliver any long promised – but never delivered – solutions to repairing the broken social care system.
“We will be going through the full detail of the settlement and making representations where we feel Plymouth has – inevitably – been short-changed.”