Protest against council cuts in Birmingham early this year (Picture: Birmingham People’s Assembly)
Schools, social housing and park maintenance. Libraries, museums and waste collection. Care homes, street lighting and flooding prevention.
All these services are hanging by a thread—a thread that Labour could soon severe in the upcoming October budget. Already, councils across England are struggling to maintain even the most basic services.
But with Labour talking about “tough choices on the horizon”, councils are set to face an even tougher test. Labour is seemingly choosing austerity—not investment—at a time when entire departments are staring down the barrel of complete collapse after years of depleting funds and rising needs.
Councils are falling like dominoes into “Section 114 notices”—a form of bankruptcy for local government. Councils across England, Wales and Scotland face a collective shortfall by 2025-26, and they’re desperately trying to scrap jobs and services in an effort to get ahead.
Tom, a 16 year old resident of Birmingham, can’t go to school anymore. That’s because he has Down’s syndrome and council bosses have taken his minibus away.
“This is very distressing for us all—especially Tom who can’t understand why he can’t go to school. He thinks his driver and chaperone don’t want to take him, which breaks my heart,” said his mum Sian.
Now, the council are offering a measly amount of funding to the family—but on strict conditions. Tom’s parents have to stump up £1,030 a year, accompany him on his journey and pay for the first three miles of every journey.
Alex in Northfield, south Birmingham is in a similar position. Now 17 years old, Alex has travelled to school by taxi ever since he was eight.
His parents are using their savings to get him to school. His mum Sylvia said, “Why is it always the vulnerable, the people who can’t fight back? It’s terrifying.”
Alex, Tom and many others like them are having services snatched because their council—Birmingham—is under a Section 114. So councils don’t have a legal responsibility to fund transport to school after the age of 16, even though eligible children want to continue their education.
Statutory children’s social care is supposed be ring fenced under Section 114. But funding for services such as school transport can often come from different departments.
And last week in Pembrokeshire, west Wales, the council decided to shut down their last day care centres. The local authority said it needs to make up a funding gap of around £32 million for the current financial year.
Service users and workers mounted protests in a desperate bid to save the centres. Pete Welsh’s daughter Abi had been going to the Anchorage centre in Pembroke Dock for 14 years.
It provides care for adults with learning difficulties and additional needs. It also supported elderly people with dementia.
He blasted the council for “putting pounds before people, not least vulnerable people at that who can’t speak up for themselves”. Pete said, “Living with somebody with additional learning needs is a 24/7 job. So it’s both a lifeline and a form of respite for us as well.”
Until 2018, only a handful of councils had ever issued Section 114 notices. In the six short years since, a flurry of notices have been handed out to cash‑strapped councils.
There would have been even more were it not for central government being forced to bung extra cash to them in the form of “exceptional financial support”. But it’s a stop gap rather than a solution.
Councils are rushing to sell off their property portfolios—everything from historic town halls to retail lets—in an effort to pay back these “exceptional financial support” packages.
Flogging buildings, sacking workers and axing services won’t be enough. The shortfall councils are facing are predicted to climb to some £6.5 billion by 2026-7. Councils under the Section 114 notices are obliged to show they’re slashing existing spending to meet their budgets. And they have to stop all new spending.
In special cases, government can allow local authorities to increase their council tax by more than the usual 5 percent limit. In 2023-2024 Croydon raised it a whopping 15 percent. Slough and Thurrock whacked it up 10 percent.
But this just means residents are paying more every month for less services. Hampshire County Council bosses have already closed some 70 children’s centres between 2010 and 2023.
In Bradford, the council has axed some 14 council-run youth centres in the same period. In Birmingham, the council is axing a swathe of job and services to claw back some cash.
The result? Ordinary, often vulnerable, people have their access to dignified lives stripped away from them. Services they used to rely on are either being withdrawn entirely or held behind strict means testing.
Care and youth services aren’t the only ones on the chopping block—Britain’s libraries are set to be even more hollowed out in the coming years. They have already taken a beating during the years of Tory austerity.
Since 2016, more than 180 council-run libraries have either been closed or handed over to volunteer groups. And poorer communities were four times more likely to have lost a publicly funded library in that time.
Libraries are more than just an opportunity to borrow books. They are a cherished community spaces where people can attend playgroups, craft sessions or access benefits help.
Now, volunteers are encouraged to take over libraries and run them for the community. All of these services enable working class people to live a decent life—and should be properly funded and run.
Chancellor Rachel Reeves and prime minister Keir Starmer are desperate to paint their new government as focused on “balancing the books”.
As such, they’re planning “multi‑year funding settlements” for councils. They claim longer-term funding will allow councils to better plan their spending and compete more competitively for contracts.
They’re not going to throw the amount of money needed into local government pots. That’s because they are committed to austerity, rather than taxing the rich.
There is money for minibuses for disabled children, libraries and day care centres. But it’s squirrelled away in tax havens and locked in savings accounts.
The wealth of billionaires in Britain has risen by 1,000 percent since 1990. And the richest 1 percent possess more wealth than the poorest 70 percent.
But Labour would rather make working class people suffer than confront this unbridled material acquisition of the rich. Starmer wants to present his government as a “safe pair of hands” for British bosses.
It’s ideological—Labour is not a party that will effectively confront the logic of capitalism. Rather than challenging Tory austerity, Labour is now defending and implementing it.
This should mean a confrontation between central government and Labour councillors up and down the country. Local administrations say they have a responsibility to not overspend their budget, no matter how much it shrinks over time.
Disgracefully, no council set an “illegal” budget during the bitter years of Tory austerity. And despite the drastically worsening state of public sector services, they are unlikely to start during the first years of a Labour government.
But in truth, the real answer lies in how much ordinary people are able to mobilise to beat back the cuts—whether they come from national or local bosses. Labour will only back off if workers launch fierce resistance to this new assault.
This will mean the union leaders have to back off from their—sometimes uneasy, sometimes cosy—relationship with Labour top brass. Particularly the Unison, Unite and GMB unions would have to take a more combative approach to Starmer.
But last week Christina McAnea, Unison union general secretary, fell in line Starmer at the TUC congress. After Starmer’s speech where he said he made “no apologies” for the cuts so far, McAnea said, “This was a serious speech from a serious prime minister.”
Currently, hundreds of thousands of local government workers in England and Wales are voting on whether to strike over pay. They should vote to strike, not just over pay, but extend their dispute to include a campaign against the cuts too.
The background to much of the current crisis is the shocking state of adult social care across England. Some 835,000 people receive long-term care, in a system that it fragmented and privatised.
That figure is only set to increase, as an ageing population mean increasing numbers of people require long-term care. It’s a sector that is rammed full of private firms cashing in on care while workers themselves earn poverty wages on insecure contracts.
Despite repeated promises to tackle the worsening situation of adult social care, successive Tory governments only saw it fall deeper into crisis. “It is older and disabled people paying the price—their safety, dignity and rights at risk as services get stretched to breaking point,” said Nadra Ahmed from the National Care Association.
“We hear from people facing uphill battles to get access to care, to get their basic needs met or to have serious concerns with care resolved.”
The London councils lobbying group told the Treasury last week that “skyrocketing” housing and homelessness pressures were pushing several boroughs to the edge of bankruptcy. They said that its budgets had been slashed by a third since 2010‑11, yet boroughs are now servicing some 11 percent more residents.
Yet the amount that councils can ask central government to pay for has been capped since 2011. Some one in 50 London residents are currently living in temporary accommodation arranged by their local borough.
They often spend years languishing in cramped and unsuitable housing. Councils today are forced to spend a small fortune putting people in hotels and private rents.
Previous administrations sold off all the council homes without building any more.
Thousands of residents in London have been without water for months
The climate crisis is impossible to ignore
The human cost of the heatwaves are higher than the temperature
Divide and rule was used to undermine struggle
