Council services ‘could suffer due to social care costs’ if government creates ‘super councils’
Council services such as leisure centres and waste collection could suffer due to the cost of social care if the government goes ahead with plans to scrap district councils in favour of “super councils”, local government sources have claimed.
They told Sky News the government is considering getting rid of district councils, which are responsible for waste collection, housing, leisure centres, local economics and regeneration.
District councils, also called borough or city councils, along with larger county councils would be merged to make “super councils” – or unitary councils – covering an entire region, the sources said.
The changes are expected in the English devolution white paper, set to be published soon, after Chancellor Rachel Reeves said in her October budget she wanted to make council structures “simpler” by reorganising them.
However, there are concerns the rising cost of social care, which larger county and unitary councils have to legally fund, will pull funding away from the basic but essential services district councils provide.
There is also a worry these large councils will become detached from local communities, despite Ms Reeves saying she wanted the reorganisation of council structures “to meet the needs of local people”.
People swim at Banbury Lido at Woodgreen Leisure Centre in Oxfordshire. File pic: PA
Bridget Smith, Lib Dem leader of South Cambridgeshire district council and vice chair of the District Councils’ Network (DCN), told Sky News: “Unitary and county councils are struggling financially, and in many cases going under, because of the ever-increasing demands of social care.
“It will be no different for these proposed ‘super councils’.
“The danger is social care will suck up all the resources which districts currently spend on place making, economic development, preventing ill health, improving quality of life and so much more.”
She added that simply reorganising local government is “simplistic and naive” and will cause new problems for local communities, and for the government’s housing targets as district councils are responsible for housing.
There is also concern if councils were merged it would take about three years to convert, which would take up all a council’s time, potentially bringing projects to a halt, including house building.
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Sam Chapman-Allen, chair of the DCN and leader of Breckland district council in Norfolk, said there are examples across England where devolution – handing power and funding from national to local government – is working well, such as Manchester where 10 district councils work together under the mayor of Greater Manchester.
Smaller examples include South Lincolnshire, where three councils work together with a shared senior team.
“I wouldn’t say my members are nervous about change because they’re really nimble, agile organisations, but we want to work with government to get the best outcomes for their residents and businesses,” he told Sky News.
He said district councils also provide lots of preventative “non-traditional” social care schemes off their own backs, such as supporting people to live a healthy life, which means they take pressure off the traditional social care system.
Housing and blocks of flats in west London. Pic: PA
Conservative shadow housing, communities and local government secretary Kevin Hollinrake told Sky News: “Services have to come first so you want to make sure they’re maintained and improve social care, and of course it’s the biggest part of the discretionary budget. It’s a valid concern.
“On the face, there are savings moving from two tier to one tier, but you don’t want the council or councillors to become too removed from what they’re serving.
“The worry here is this is an imposition rather than asking councillors if they want to move to unitary – that’s top down rather than bottom up.
“It’s perverse, you’re talking about devolving then telling councils what to do. It’s a bit of a paradox.”
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A spokesman for the ministry of housing, communities and local government said there are “no plans to abolish district councils” and any organisation will be “from the bottom up”.
He added: “No decisions have been taken on council reorganisation.
“Our priority is to focus on the transfer of power from Westminster and work with councils to create structures that make sense for their local areas and work effectively for local people.
“We have announced £1.3bn to help councils deliver essential services – including an additional £233m to help prevent homelessness, and will be providing greater stability with multi-year funding settlements, so we can get councils back on their feet.
“We will set out further details in the upcoming English devolution white paper.”
Haliey Welch, better known as the “Hawk tuah girl,” says the Federal Bureau of Investigation briefly probed her after her “memecoin disaster” — the failed launch of a token in her image that she promoted.
Welch said in a May 21 episode of her “Talk Tuah” podcast that the FBI showed up at her grandmother’s house looking to speak to her over the Hawk Tuah (HAWK) crypto token, which many crypto commentators have called an exit scam.
“After the coin launch, the feds came to granny’s house and knocked on her door, and she called me, having a heart attack, saying: ‘The FBI is here after you, what have you done?’”
Welch said she handed over her phone to the FBI and met with agents who “interrogated me, asking me questions and everything else related to crypto.”
“They cleared me, I was good to go,” Welch said.
Welch went viral for her response about an oral sex technique in a vox pop interview posted to YouTube in June.
The HAWK memecoin, based on her viral catchphrase, launched in early December and almost immediately lost 90% of its value and blockchain analytics firm Bubblemaps’ alleged insider wallets and snipers bought up and dumped massive quantities of the token at launch.
Welch said on her podcast that the Securities and Exchange Commission also asked for her phone, and she sent it off “for two or three days” before she was cleared.
Welch’s lawyer James Sallah told TMZ in March that the SEC “closed the investigation without making any findings against, or seeking any monetary sanctions from, Haliey.”
“I trusted the wrong people”
Welch admitted knowing very little about crypto before the HAWK memecoin and said she “trusted the wrong people” for the launch.
She claimed a company, which she said she couldn’t name for legal reasons, was in full control of her X account, which posted videos of her promoting the memecoin.
Welch said she was sent lines to record on video, which were then posted on her X account by someone she trusted but could also not legally name.
She added that on the day of HAWK’s launch, she “kind of knew something was up” and was pulled into a room where a team of people told her to talk on a livestream with YouTuber Stephen Findeisen, better known as Coffeezilla.
“Coffeezilla got on there and they’re like ‘Mute it, mute it,’” Welch said. “Nobody warned me about this guy at all, like nobody at all, they didn’t tell me he was like a crypto wizard, that’s exactly what he is — he ate me the fuck up.”
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Welch said she was only paid a marketing fee and “did not make a dime from the coin itself,” which she said had been totally spent on legal and public relations fees.
Despite being cleared of any legal wrongdoing, Welch took some accountability, admitting that she let many of her fans down who invested in the coin:
“It makes me feel really bad that they trusted me, and I led them to something that I did not have enough knowledge about. I did not have enough knowledge about crypto to be getting involved with it. And I knew that, but I got talked into it, and I trusted the wrong people.”
A group of HAWK buyers sued the alleged creators of the token in December, claiming Alex Schultz, the token’s backing Tuah the Moon Foundation, the token launchpad overHere Limited, and its founder Clinton So promoted and sold HAWK as an unregistered security.
Welch wasn’t named as a defendant.
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Has Labour got the right strategy to tackle Reform UK?
Nigel Farage’s party cost the Tories dozens, maybe 100-plus seats at the general election. Now it looks like the party is hitting Labour too. But has Sir Keir Starmer got the right answers?
Last year, Labour won a landslide because the Tory vote collapsed, in part because Reform UK took chunks of their supporters in constituencies across the UK.
And here is the situation on 1 May this year – the national equivalent vote share at the council elections put Reform well ahead in first place. Success – this time at the expense of Labour too.
How big a threat is this to MPs? As a very crude experiment, Sky News has looked at what would happen if this result was replicated evenly across parliamentary constituencies.
Within the areas where there were county council elections are 77 complete Westminster seats with sitting Labour MPs.
This includes places like Wycombe, where Treasury minister Emma Reynolds holds. Or Lincoln, won by Foreign Office minister Hamish Falconer.
Now if – for fun – we mapped the country council results from 1 May evenly across these general election constituencies, almost all those Labour seats are gone. All lost, apart from five. That’s 72 out of 77 Labour MPs losing their seats and mostly to Reform UK.
What if we took that swing an applied across the whole country, places where there weren’t local elections?
Angela Rayner in Greater Manchester and Jess Phillips in Birmingham would lose their seats.
Yes this is a crude measure – it assumes a uniform swing can be drawn from the 1 May polls – and local and national elections are very different.
But importantly, YouGov’s latest national opinion polls paint a similar picture to the council elections. Meanwhile, 89 out of 98 constituencies where Reform came second place have Labour in first. Labour MPs are feeling the heat from Farage.
The Reform threat is real. Sir Keir Starmer knows it – and this year has started chasing Reform votes. Slashing aid spending. Abandoning green promises. Hard talk about immigration and living on an “Island of Strangers”.
Sensible given the clear and evident Reform UK threat? Actually – maybe not. Look at the data in detail:
This block here is all the people who voted Labour in last year’s general election. Now thanks to YouGov polling, we know what people in this block would do with their vote now.
It shows Labour has lost more than half of last year’s voters. Just 46% still say they’d still vote for Sir Keir’s party. But – despite the PM’s strategy – they’re not actually going to Reform in large numbers.
Just 6% of Labour’s voters at last year’s general election – six out of every 100 – said they would vote Reform now. That’s all. So where have they gone?
Well, they’ve been lost much more to liberal and left-wing parties – 12% to the Lib Dems, 9% to the Greens.
So just pause there. That means the number of Labour voters who have switched to the Lib Dems and Greens, arguably on the left of the political spectrum, is three times the number going to Reform to the right.
Just 2% go to the Tories.
And much more seriously for Labour, 22% aren’t going to vote, don’t know or won’t say.
The bottom line is people who voted Reform have never backed Labour in large numbers.
This shows how Reform supporters last year voted in each election since 2005. You can see – Reform voters are former UKIP voters. They’re Boris Johnson’s Tories.
Let’s put it another way. While 11% of Labour voters may one day be open to voting Reform, 70% are at risk of going to the Lib Dems or Greens – seven times the threat from Reform.
And typically, these voters don’t like the hard line, Reform-leaning policies of Sir Keir Starmer recently.
The local elections show there is a threat to Labour from Reform. But our data suggests Keir Starmer trying to be Nigel Farage lite isn’t the answer.
Is Labour’s strategy really working?
The US Securities and Exchange Commission has charged crypto platform Unicoin and three of its executives, alleging they made false and misleading statements about its crypto assets that raised $100 million from investors.
The SEC said on May 20 that it charged Unicoin CEO Alex Konanykhin, board member Silvina Moschini, and former investment chief Alex Dominguez with misleading investors about certificates that conveyed rights to receive Unicoin tokens and stock.
Mark Cave, associate director in the SEC’s Division of Enforcement, claimed the trio “exploited thousands of investors with fictitious promises that its tokens, when issued, would be backed by real-world assets including an international portfolio of valuable real estate holdings.”
Related: SEC crypto task force to release first report ‘in the next few months’
“The real estate assets were worth a mere fraction of what the company claimed, and the majority of the company’s sales of rights certificates were illusory,” Cave added.
The SEC’s complaint, filed in a Manhattan federal court, charged Unicoin and the three executives with various securities laws violations and asks for permanent injunctive relief, along with paying back the allegedly ill-gotten gains.
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