Tough times ahead for Hackney, warns Town Hall

By Hackney Citizen | Thursday 1 July 2010 at 23:07

Hackney Town Hall, Mare Street

Hackney Council will get more say over how it spends the cash it gets from the Government though it will receive less of it overall under austerity measures announced in the coalition government’s emergency budget last month.

The removal of ring-fencing for a large number of national grants will allow the Council to decide when and where the axe will fall.

The Council’s director of finance Ian Williams told its Governance and Resources Scrutiny Commission meeting that this “total discretion” was an interesting approach but that ministers are yet to publish the exact details of the proposals.

Back in May, the coalition government outlined plans to cut local authority spending by £1.2 billion in the current tax year. The good news for Hackney is that the Council’s lump-sum ‘formula grant’, which provides 75 per cent of its budget, will remain unchanged at £220 million (p.23).

Nationally, the Dedicated Schools Grant and Sure Start, the biggest education and childcare grants respectively, will also be protected.

Moreover, in the emergency budget unveiled on 22 June, the Government outlined plans to keep council tax frozen next year. The Government cannot force councils to freeze their budgets, but have said that any council which limits its spending rises to 2.5 per cent will get that amount back from Whitehall.

Specific and area-based grants given to local authorities to support particular national priorities will be harder to come by, however. According to the Department for Communities and Local Government, in the current tax year Hackney Council will receive £3.79 million less in specific and area grants than previously envisaged (p.19).

At present Hackney Council benefits from 49 such grants, with by far the largest one going towards adult social services. In the current tax year it is due to receive £52.1 million in area-based grants, up from £31 million in 2009.

“We have to prepare ourselves for some tough times ahead,” said Mr Williams at the recent commission meeting.

Hackney resident and Conservative London Assembly Member Andrew Boff commented: “The pain that will be felt in Hackney is the price of Labour’s delays in dealing with the deficit.

“If Labour had won the General Election we would still be faced with substantial cuts in spending, but its package of measures wouldn’t have been enough – they preferred to put the difficult off decisions, hoping the problem would just go away.”

Despite the cuts, the Council says it is committed to completing existing large projects which are already under way. A Council spokesperson said the Dalston Square development and key programmes such as Building Schools For The Future and Decent Homes are going ahead as planned, and funding has already been allocated.

Share this: