Swindon Link Budget Special

Chancellor Rachel Reeves' Budget goes at least some way toward addressing the local government penury which affects everybody - and vulnerable people most of all.

In a recent edition of Swindon Link's sister publication, The Ink, we called on Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves to show Swindon the money.

Although we somehow doubt she saw the article, the Budget has gone at least some way toward delivering.

If the most important aspects of any Budget are those which affect the vast majority of us in one way or another, it’s not difficult to work out which aspects of the first Labour Budget since 2010 will attract the most attention.

The Chancellor said her measures would include £1.3bn extra for local authorities, including £600m for social care and £230m toward relieving homelessness and rough sleeping. Special Educational Needs and Disabilities (SEND) provision will be boosted by £1bn and there will be a £6.7bn capital investment in schools.

It would take a very strange, very privileged or very mean-spirited person indeed to claim this extra funding is anything other than vital.

The best part of a decade and a half of grinding austerity has severely damaged Swindon’s infrastructure, its services and its ability to look after the interests of those who live within its boundaries, particularly those who have pressing social needs or are otherwise vulnerable. Recognising this is not a matter of one’s political alignment but simply of whether one is sentient.

Our borough council, for example, has seen a real-terms drop of more than 40 percent in funding from Central Government, leaving the authority so much on its uppers that it must set aside more than 85 pence in every pound it receives from Whitehall and other sources to cover the tasks it is legally obliged to perform, including looking after vulnerable people and providing viable social services.

And the remaining funds, amounting to less than 15 pence in the pound? Is it any wonder that so many of our streets are potholed obstacle courses? That so many of the services we once took for granted as part and parcel of what we expected to be covered by the local authority in exchange for our council tax have had to be pared and pared again? That people are sometimes surprised to learn that those services exist any longer at all?

Will the extra provision announced earlier this afternoon by the Chancellor solve this crisis, born of many years’ chronic underfunding, at a stroke? Of course not. There is a temptation when a Government - or a council for that matter - acknowledges a dreadful, scandalous problem and pledges to address it, to adopt the mentality that rescue is here at last and everything is going to be fine again, if not immediately then shortly.

However, addressing the wretched state into which so many of our local authority services and other public services have inevitably fallen will take rather more than one Budget and one tranche of cash, even if that tranche runs to nine or 10 digits.

The sums unveiled by the Chancellor are enormous, but we must bear in mind that they must be shared among every local authority in the land, many of which find themselves in situations as challenging as Swindon’s if not more so. The money includes, for example, £500m to address the crisis in road maintenance, but with countless tens of thousands of roads throughout the country in need of vital repairs, anybody who imagines every pothole in this town or any other town or city will soon be eradicated is in for a sore disappointment.

The overriding take-home from the Budget, certainly as far as services in Swindon are concerned, is that while things will not be perfect or even approach perfection for quite a while, we are moving firmly in the right direction after years of doing the exact opposite.

The announcement of a £5bn housing commitment will also come as desperately-needed good news to the millions of people who have been robbed by the housing shortage of so much as the hope of every being able to put a decent roof over their head. Extra housing will not be such good news for certain developers, private landlords and others who profit from the shortage, of course, but they have had things their own way for far too long.

And the details of how all this will be paid for?

If one had believed certain national newspapers and TV pundits these last few weeks, one might have been forgiven for thinking that the Chancellor planned to squeeze businesses until - as one of her predecessors many years ago put it - the pips squeaked.

As things turned out, this was far from the case. The Chancellor shrewdly recognises that hurting employers until they have to think about scaling back their operations or perhaps giving up altogether is no way to grow an economy.

The modest increase in employers' National Insurance contributions from 13.8 to 15 percent and the lowering of the earnings threshold from £9,100 to £5,000 will hardly be welcomed by those affected, but neither, we suspect, will it lead to overmuch gnashing of teeth and rending of garments, especially when considered alongside the Employment Allowance increase from £5,000 to £10,500.

Other evidence of the Chancellor’s shrewdness included ‘crowd-pleasers’ such as increasing the windfall tax on oil and gas profits, which will surely be music to the ears of the millions who resent energy companies and their top executives and shareholders taking home eye-watering sums while the ordinary people at the other end of rising energy bills continue to suffer.

Likewise the retention of the inheritance tax threshold at £325,000, or £500,000 if the inheritance in question includes a property. With the value of just about any home in the country having long since crossed the threshold into three figures, this measure will be seen my many as only fair.

The announcement of the abolition of the non-dom tax system, meanwhile, is not only morally correct but also a surefire way to win friends and influence people among those who believe the current system is grossly unfair to the vast majority who ‘play the game’ and pay their dues.

As with all Budgets, this one should not be looked at through a party political or ideological lens but rather empirically. Whether we think the Government delivering it is the best thing since sliced bread or the exact opposite, the only viable criteria for judgement are whether the Budget addresses inequity, promotes growth and paves the way for further improvements in the years to come.