‘The community stuff that makes us feel good doesn’t happen anymore’: Can councils survive spending cuts?
Nottingham Castle was built nearly 1,000 years ago, designed as an impregnable Norman fort.
Today it is a tourist attraction – but just as inaccessible.
The castle, owned by the council, has been closed since November, when its trust went into liquidation.
It is a symbol of a city and of a council that has struggled financially in the two years since it lost £38m on a failed company – Robin Hood Energy.
But it tells a bigger tale, of a local government system which is creaking – stripped of cash by Westminster and shaped by incentives and pressures that can lead councils to financial disaster.
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Just down the road from Nottingham Castle is a centre called Base 51 that works with vulnerable young people.
Its funding from Nottingham City Council has been completely cut so it’s launched a crowdfunding campaign. But as things stand, it will have to vacate its premises in six months.
Three teenagers were there when Sky News visited.
“Before I started coming here I was going out and getting into trouble,” Deyarni Beedy-Lamonte said.
“But since I’ve started coming here I’ve been offered counselling. And obviously that’s helped get me onto a better path.”
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Local councils explained
Quinn Vahey says there’s little else on offer for teenagers in Nottingham. “If I weren’t here, I’d be getting in trouble every day basically. I’d probably get arrested by now.”
Nottingham City Council told Sky News: “Like all councils, the City Council has been receiving less and less in government grants over the past 13 years to pay for local services, which has forced us to cut services that we would prefer not to.”
Not all councils have launched an energy company, though, and seen it go quite spectacularly bust.
But the council is right about government funding – grants from central government have fallen nearly 90% since 2014.
During roughly the same period, councils have cut back on discretionary spending.
Take roads, for instance – fixing things like potholes. Around £1bn was spent across all councils in 2013.
Today, that’s fallen to £690m, even after adjusting for inflation. Or street lighting, which has lost £100m in funding.
One of the most famous councillors in the country (not a crowded field) is Jackie Weaver.
She went viral after a chaotic Zoom meeting of a parish council, in which she was told: “You have no authority here Jackie Weaver. No authority at all.”
But Weaver is chief officer at Cheshire Association of Local Councils and knows the subject inside out.
“As money has got tighter over, I would say, the last 10 years, probably, we’ve seen the district and county councils in Cheshire disappear, the county council disappeared altogether, contract so much that now they only perform their statutory functions,” she told Sky News.
“Now, that means all the kind of community stuff that is visible, that makes us feel good, doesn’t happen anymore. They don’t have any money to do it. They only focus on statutory obligations.”
Statutory obligations are services that councils are legally obliged to provide and the most important, and the most expensive, is social care.
Councils are spending an ever greater share of their budgets on social care, as the population ages and care demands become more complex.
Total council spending has gone from £26bn 10 years ago to £30bn today, again adjusted for inflation.
If you look at social care as a proportion of councils’ total spending, you can see just how much it’s eating up – from 57% in 2012 to 62% last year.
Three councils – Nottinghamshire, Staffordshire and Halton in Cheshire – spent more than three quarters of their total 2021/22 budgets on providing social care.
So: add a massive cut in central government funding to a huge increase in demand for services councils are legally obliged to provide and spending cuts in other areas seem inevitable.
This isn’t just a tale of austerity, though, but a deliberate redesign, dating back to changes to the system made back in 2010.
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Who pays the most council tax?
“Councils were told to be innovative, entrepreneurial – to act like any other company, and this involved investments, property, other sorts of investments, maybe outside their own local authority area,” Jonathan Werran, CEO of thinktank Localis, told Sky News.
“But the reason they were doing this was to earn revenue to fund the local public services upon which people depend and rely upon – trying to plug the gap.”
That “entrepreneurial” model may have suited some councils – but it has led others, like Nottingham, into choppy financial waters.
Nottingham issued a Section 114 notice – a formal declaration of financial problems – in 2021.
But it’s far from the only one.
Thurrock, Slough and Kent have all issued Section 114 notices within the last year.
Levelling Up: Areas with high levels of deprivation suffered the most from austerity
Woking, which has racked up £2bn in debt investing in property, has said it is in danger of doing the same.
“There’s definitely more and more councils that are in challenging financial positions – a number of councils over the last five years or so particularly have borrowed quite heavily to fund investment in property,” Tim Oliver, chairman of the County Councils Network, told Sky News.
The person who changed the system was Lord Pickles, secretary of state for communities and local government in David Cameron’s coalition government, in 2010.
The idea behind the reforms was “essentially, to give [councils] more power and give them more say of how they spent things”, Lord Pickles told Sky News.
“And it’s called localism. And it really was designed to give power right down to the lowest level in local government.”
Sky News asked him about the councils that have issued Section 114 notices and whether it was a good idea to ask councils to be more entrepreneurial with public money.
“I want to say so, I think a lot of it boils down to a lack of due diligence,” he said.
“But the ones that we talk about, I think that there’s been a kind of a real problem when they’re sort of moved into this without properly thinking it through.”
Tom Cheshire speaks with teenagers in Nottingham
Every council Sky News spoke to said they need more money from central government.
A spokesperson for the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities told Sky News: “We are making an additional £5.1bn available for councils in England in the next financial year.
“We are also providing multi-year certainty to local government, outlining spending over the next two years to allow councils to plan ahead with confidence.”
Sky News understands that around £2bn of that new money is intended for social care.
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See how much your council spends
But that represents just a 6.67% increase on the total amount spent by councils – at a time when inflation is significantly higher.
Councils will still struggle to afford social care, which means they will struggle to provide other services.
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And that may ultimately end up costing even more. Take Base 51 for example. As non-statutory spending, it can be cut.
But if those teenagers get into trouble and enter the social care or criminal justice system, that ends up costing more down the line.
“That’s the challenge we’re trying to work through now,” Mr Oliver told Sky News.
“You need to sort of double run it.
“So you need to have sufficient money to deliver the services to the people that are already in the system. But then equally you need to put funding and investment into prevention and early intervention.
“It is a false economy, not to invest in that early prevention. But that is the challenge around finding the funding to do both.”
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Labour demand council tax freeze
Local government can be an unglamorous subject but it has a huge impact on people’s lives: the fabric of our society is made up of many threads.
Many of them are small: street lights, bin collections, pot holes, community centres.
Some are huge, like social care.
And pick at those threads, year after year, and it adds up to the sense that the social fabric, the deal between citizens and state, is fraying.
The Data and Forensics team is a multi-skilled unit dedicated to providing transparent journalism from Sky News. We gather, analyse and visualise data to tell data-driven stories. We combine traditional reporting skills with advanced analysis of satellite images, social media and other open source information. Through multimedia storytelling we aim to better explain the world while also showing how our journalism is done.
Three people have died following a helicopter crash during a flying lesson on the Isle of Wight.
A fourth person is in hospital in a serious condition following the incident, according to Hampshire Police.
Officers were called to the scene of a “helicopter that had come down” off Shanklin Road near Ventnor at 9.24am on Monday, the force said.
A spokesman for the aircraft’s owner Northumbria Helicopters said G-OCLV – which is listed as a Robinson R44 II helicopter – was involved in the accident during a flying lesson.
Fire and rescue vehicles at the scene near Ventnor. Pic: Stu Southwell
Aerial view of the crash site
Four people, including the pilot, were on board the aircraft, which departed nearby Sandown Airport at 9am, the company also said in a statement.
A critical care team, including a doctor and specialist paramedic, was also sent to the crash site, Hants and Isle of Wight Air Ambulance added, alongside fire engines and other emergency vehicles.
The Air Accidents Investigation Branch confirmed it was alerted to the incident and was sending a team to investigate. A major incident was declared but has since been stood down.
A spokesperson for Hampshire and Isle of Wight Air Ambulance said in a statement: “We have treated and airlifted one patient to the Major Trauma Centre, University Hospital Southampton. Our thoughts are with them, and everyone involved in today’s incident.”
Darren Toogood, editor and publisher at the Island Echo, told Sky News presenter Kamali Melbourne the helicopter crashed on a “significantly busy, high-speed road” between the village of Godshill and the seaside town of Shanklin.
“It was on one of the first flights of the day,” he said.
“It’s a bank holiday weekend in August on the Isle of Wight. It’s an incredibly busy area. Lots of tourists down at the moment. It appears no vehicles were involved, which is incredible, given how busy this road would have been this morning.”
A witness, Leigh Goldsmith, told the Isle of Wight County Press she saw the helicopter “spiralling” before crashing into a hedge as she drove along the road.
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Police have closed Shanklin Road, blocking it off with several emergency vehicles, and are warning people to avoid the area.
Northumbria Helicopters said it is “giving its full cooperation to the authorities investigating this incident”.
Joe Robertson, the MP for Isle of Wight East, said the local community was in shock.
“My heart goes out to the families of those who lost their lives in the helicopter crash outside Shanklin today,” he said in a statement. “It is very sad and tragic news during what should have been a happy Bank Holiday helicopter flight from Sandown Airport. The whole community is in shock.
“My sincere thanks to all the emergency services personnel who have been involved and to the investigators for their work ahead.”
UK
‘Tamed’ algorithms and plummeting porn views: Impact of new online safety rules revealed one month on
Sweeping new rules designed to deal with the “total Wild West” young people were experiencing online have now been in place across the UK for a month.
Ofcom’s Children’s Codes require pornography and other harmful content to be kept away from young people, either through age verification or algorithm changes.
More than half a million people have signed a petition calling for the Online Safety Act to be repealed, while ministers insist the legislation’s been a success.
So what difference have these controversial new regulations made?
‘I feel more clean’
In the days before they were enforced, Sky News spoke to a group of teenagers at a youth club in Warrington, and their experiences online were stark.
They told us about frequently stumbling across violence, pornography and harmful mental health content in their social media feeds.
One 17-year-old described seeing more harmful and inappropriate content online “than I can count”. Even a 12-year-old described being shown language that “can be quite explicit for children my age”.
So, one month later, we spoke to some of the teenagers again. The difference in what they reported was remarkable.
Ryan, 17, told us previously that the internet was a “very, very malicious” place and described frequently seeing inappropriate content.
Just one month on, he says his algorithm now seems “tamed” – although he’d still describe the internet as malicious.
“[My] algorithms have been quite tame in comparison to what they were. I haven’t seen any sort of advertisements and stuff that can be alluding towards anything inappropriate,” he said.
Liam, 16, also said Instagram felt “tamed” compared to what it was like before.
He was previously being served a lot of eating disorder content but “in the time that the rules have been in place I don’t actually think I’ve seen any”.
“I used to see them every few scrolls so it’s very much gone down.”
Young people gathered at the Warrington Youth Zone to talk to Sky News about online safety
Seventeen-year-old Indie said she now feels like she “can actually scroll on the internet worry-free of what’s going to pop up”. Abbey, 17, also said she feels less worried about scrolling now.
“I feel really good about [the new rules] because now I don’t have to worry about seeing things I don’t want to see,” she said.
Ryan, 15, previously told us he was frequently being shown violent content that would ruin his day. Now, “when I’m scrolling TikTok, I’m free from violence”, he said.
“It feels better, to be honest. I feel more clean, in a sort of way, because like, I’ve not seen it.”
Of the six teenagers we re-interviewed, only one – 15-year-old Oliver – said he hadn’t really noticed a change.
However, harmful content is still sometimes being shown to teens, we soon found out.
Self-harm content on TikTok
We decided to test the social media platforms ourselves, inspired by an experiment run by the Molly Rose Foundation (MRF) in the weeks running up to the rules being enforced.
At that time, MRF found their teen Instagram and TikTok accounts were bombarded with self-harm and suicide content.
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Sky News experimented with fake teen accounts to see whether harmful content was still available
One month later, we created TikTok and Instagram accounts belonging to a 15-year-old and searched for terms relating to suicide and self-harm.
On Instagram, all three search terms took us to a mental health support page, signposting to helplines and advice.
On TikTok, however, that wasn’t the case.
One search term took us to a mental health support page, similar to Instagram’s.
Another search term showed the message “no results”.
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Teens targeted with ‘suicide content’
But a third, relating to a specific type of self-harm, brought up numerous posts that should no longer be shown to young people under Ofcom’s guidance.
Some posts used euphemisms, others were more explicit about their content. None of it should be available to children in the UK now.
In response to our experiment, a TikTok spokesperson said:
“TikTok has designed 70+ features and settings that support the safety and well-being of teens and families on our app, and we partner with organisations such as Samaritans and the International Association for Suicide Prevention to bring well-being resources directly to our community.
“We continually enforce comprehensive Community Guidelines, with over 99% of violative content proactively removed by TikTok.
“This single account does not reflect the real experience of a teen on our platform.”
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‘Children as young as six’ finding porn
Pornography views plummet…
But a lot of the controversy about these rules hasn’t come from children. Adults use the internet too and the new age verification rules seem to have impacted the way they surf the web.
Not everyone’s happy about it.
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What are the new online rules?
In the days after the new rules came in, hundreds of thousands of people signed a petition to repeal the Online Safety Act, the legislation that underpins Ofcom’s regulations.
Despite the government responding to that petition to say it had “no plans” to repeal the act, the number of signatories has now passed half a million.
“We all want children to be safe online, but I don’t think those benefits outweigh the significant costs, not just to millions of low-abiding children and adults in the UK, but also the effect this is having elsewhere around the world,” said Matthew Feeney, advocacy manager at Big Brother Watch.
He brought up privacy concerns before the rules were introduced and says he’s still concerned, having seen them in action.
“It’s doing the UK no favours internationally,” he said. “No other liberal democracy has taken steps like this in this kind of way.
“There are ways to talk about child safety online without embracing this approach to the internet, which treats everyone as a child by default.”
In Westminster, the rules proved controversial too; when Reform leader Nigel Farage said his party would repeal the act if elected, Technology Secretary Peter Kyle responded on Sky News by saying Mr Farage was “on the side of predators”.
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“Anybody who thinks this legislation is going to be perfect in this moment must think again,” said Baroness Beeban Kidron, founder of 5Rights and a longtime supporter of the new legislation.
“It should not be a conversation about attackers, detractors, defenders. What we have to do is go again, and again, and again until we get the balance right.”
One of the most obvious ways general internet use has changed since the rules came in is through pornography.
According to a recent report by the Children’s Commissioner, the world’s four largest pornography sites received nearly 11 billion visitors each month in 2020; more than the number of visitors to Amazon, LinkedIn, Netflix, Zoom and eBay combined.
But within a day of the new regulations, the number of UK visitors to pornography sites plummeted – and has stayed low.
Data given to Sky News by Similarweb showed that between 19 July and 15 August, there was a 45% drop in the number of UK users to Pornhub, the country’s most popular pornography site.
Across the top 100 sites, there was a 33% drop.
Even pornography-based forums took a hit – Subreddits linked to bondage, discipline, sadism, and masochism (BDSM), for example, are experiencing 12% fewer visits from the UK than before the rules were introduced.
But that doesn’t necessarily mean the UK has lost its appetite for adult content.
But VPN use seems to be up
At the same time as UK porn visits were plummeting, the use of virtual private networks (VPNs) was rocketing, as people bypassed new age verification pages altogether.
VPNs mask their users’ location and may mean that plenty of people were accessing porn… they just didn’t look like they were in the UK.
The number of people searching for VPNs on Google spiked dramatically in the days after the rules were introduced.
Although the interest has waned, it is still higher than pre-regulation levels.
Five out of Apple’s top 10 downloaded apps were VPNs just one day after the rules started being enforced.
Baroness Beeban doesn’t believe it is children using VPNs to bypass age verification.
“I’ve actually found it extraordinary that the assumption is that all of the VPN surge is children. Think about it carefully.
“A lot of it will be adults who are actually trying to hide their own behaviour now that you actually have to be a bit more transparent.”
Anyone feeling emotionally distressed or suicidal can call Samaritans for help on 116 123 or email jo@samaritans.org in the UK. In the US, call the Samaritans branch in your area or 1 (800) 273-TALK
A campaign encouraging people to use headphones when playing music on public transport is being rolled out in London from today.
Posters will begin appearing on the Elizabeth line on Tuesday reminding travellers not to play music out loud or to have conversations on speaker mode, as it may disturb other passengers.
It is the latest part of Transport for London’s Travel Kind campaign, which is being rolled out across the wider transport network.
Rules around train travel already make playing music out loud an offence. But like other issues, such as fare evasion, this is subject to being enforced by the British Transport Police or the train operators themselves.
People using their phones for loud content has become a political issue in recent months, with both the Liberal Democrats and Conservatives urging ministers to take action on it.
Earlier this year, the Lib Dems called for fines of up to £1,000 for “headphone dodgers” who play music out loud on buses and trains, while Tory shadow transport secretary Richard Holden said passengers should not have to “endure somebody else’s choice of crap music”.
Seb Dance, deputy mayor of London for transport, said the small minority who “play music or videos out loud can be a real nuisance to other passengers and directly disturb their journeys”.
“However Londoners spend their journey, whether catching up on their favourite series or listening to music, we want everyone to have a pleasant journey.”
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A previous Travel Kind campaign encouraged travellers to offer priority seating to those who need it. Pic: Transport for London
Posters will also encourage people to look up from their phones and to be aware that others travelling may be in need of a seat.
Previously, the Travel kind campaign included calls for vigilance about sexual harassment and urged travellers to move down inside London’s Tube carriages to ensure others can get on.
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