Government Support - Policy Change and Market Regulation

We welcome the Government’s commitment to multi-year financial settlements which are needed to provide certainty and support better financial management and securing of financial sustainability for Bradford and for the wider sector.

We also welcome the Government’s aim to end competitive funding streams. Government funding for regeneration should be awarded according to evidence of need and impact rather than through simple per capita formulae and competitive bidding, which is expensive, time consuming and diverts Council resources from other activities with no certainty around the outcomes.

Agility and flexibility on Levelling Up Fund projects. There needs to be a clear recognition that many of the original projects have evolved into meaningful schemes which can be delivered however, a faster,  more agile change approval request process is required to allow these projects to commence.

Fair and sustainable funding for vital Council services and to support the delivery of growth. Urgent acceleration of financial reforms to reflect needs and local resources. Bradford’s low local tax base presents challenges because, Band D Council tax is 8.5% below the average for Metropolitan authorities and 80% of households are below Band D. This means that increases in Council tax raise far less money in Bradford than in many other often more affluent, places potentially leading to postcode lotteries in the range and quality of local services. In Bradford, raising Council tax and social care to the maximum allowed without a referendum would only raise around £13m a year which is dwarfed by inflationary pressures of over £60m. Furthermore, excluding exceptional financial support, the proportion of the Council’s budget funded by council taxpayers is now 57% compared to 37% in 2011 and the burden of council tax falls disproportionately on households on lower incomes. The use of council tax to bridge local authority funding gaps therefore represents an increasingly regressive measure and the system requires reform with funding based on need and local resources. Independent analysis by sector experts Pixel demonstrates that overtime Bradford would benefit by £32m a year from implementation of the Fair Funding Review and reforms to business rates. These reforms have been persistently delayed and we now need to see rapid implementation.

Sufficient funding to meet demand and complexity in Children’s and Adult Social Care. Pressures on children’s social services reflect national issues around increasing demand and complexity and challenges in recruitment and retention as well as the need to deliver improvements in Bradford. The Association of Directors of Children’s Services has estimated that authorities will need £778m just to standstill. Bradford must also improve its services and we have moved to a Children’s Trust model that will require sustainable funding. Gross expenditure on Children’s Social Care (inclusive of services provided by BCFT and others provided by the Council) has increased by over £150m, from c£100m in 2019-20 to over £250m in 2023-24, and benchmark spend has gone from low to extremely high over that period. In relation to adult social care, Bradford is a relatively low cost, high performance but has considerable and rising demand and need driven by population growth, complexity of cases and significant deprivation. Increasing demand sits alongside challenges in recruitment and retention as competitive wages for care workers are increasingly unaffordable for cash strapped Councils.

Public Sector Reform. We must seize this opportunity to do things differently especially in demand driven areas such as social care recognising the key role of local councils and their partners in service delivery, leadership and collaboration and in understanding their communities. We want to play our part; for example, Bradford has worked with Government to trial place-based approaches to public service delivery, and we are keen to build on that work to secure flexibility in the deployment of public resources across agencies.

Invest in prevention and early help. Key to improving outcomes in public services is recognition of the demand and inflationary pressures on local authorities that restrict the scope for investment in early help and prevention. But, while new investment is necessary, Bradford’s data and analytics offer focussed on prevention and early help can test new approaches that will reduce pressure on statutory services. We want Bradford to act as a testbed for new, flexible approaches to place based public services that maximise the impact of the totality of public spending in the district and provide flexibility around the use of existing resources across organisations and systems.

Market Regulation of Children’s Residential Placements. The Market and Competitions Authority has determined that a dysfunctional market for children’s residential care is fuelling private sector profiteering from competition for scarce places. Residential fees are up from £3,600 per week in 2020-21 to c£6,500 now. If enacted, the recently proposed Health and Social Care (Wales) Bill will permit only not-for-profit organisations and councils to provide fostering, children’s home, and secure accommodation placements. If carefully implemented and properly resourced, this could remove market-driven inflation and keep costs down. The government could consider similar legislation for England. The private sector has profited from public funds and the public sector offers good quality at a lower price, but we lose staff to the private sector who can afford to pay far higher wages and charge accordingly, for often provision that is no better or even less good than that in the public sector.