‘The community stuff that makes us feel good doesn’t happen anymore’: Can councils survive spending cuts?

Published

2 years ago

April 1, 2023

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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.”

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.

“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.”

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.

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.”

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.

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UK

‘I’m deprived of my UK citizenship but I’m not a convicted terrorist’

Published

9 hours ago

August 24, 2025

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'I'm deprived of my UK citizenship but I'm not a convicted terrorist'

Hayat Tahrir al Sham (HTS) went from a jihadist movement once aligned to al Qaeda to forming the official government of Syria.

It was a monumental transformation for them, their country and the wider Middle East.

But potentially too for British people who went to Syria – and who were stripped of their citizenship as a result, on the grounds of national security.

Tauqir Sharif, better known as Tox, went to Syria in 2012 as an aid worker. He was accused of being part of a group affiliated with al Qaeda, which he denies, and the then-home secretary Amber Rudd deprived him of his British citizenship in 2017.

“As of now, I am deprived of my UK citizenship but I’m not a convicted terrorist – and the reason for that is because we refused, we boycotted, the SIAC [Special Immigration Appeals Commission] secret courts, which don’t allow you to see any of the evidence presented against you,” he said.

“And one of the things that I always called for was, look, put me in front of a jury, let’s have an open hearing.”

HTS is still a proscribed terrorist organisation but the British government has now established relations with it.

Foreign Secretary David Lammy travelled to Damascus to meet the jihadist-turned-Syrian interim president – the man who swapped his nom de guerre of al Jolani for Ahmed al Sharaa.

If the UK government takes HTS off the terror list, what does that mean for those who lost their citizenship after being accused of being part of it?

People who joined HTS are only a subset among the scores of people who have had their citizenship revoked – a tool the UK government has been quick to use.

According to a report by the Parliamentary Joint Human Rights Committee, the UK “uses deprivation of citizenship orders more than almost any country in the world”.

The peak of that was in 2017, and mainly in relation to Syria – especially in the case of people joining Islamic State, perhaps most famously Shamima Begum.

And because people cannot be made entirely stateless, and need to have a second nationality, or be potentially eligible for one, there are worries of racism in who the orders apply to.

Countries like Pakistan and Bangladesh offer dual nationality, whereas other nations do not. In 2022, the Institute of Race Relations said “the vast majority of those deprived are Muslim men with South Asian or Middle Eastern/North African heritage”.

Legal grey areas

Sky News submitted Freedom of Information requests to the Home Office asking for a breakdown of second nationalities of those deprived of citizenship, but was refused twice on national security grounds.

The independent reviewer of terrorism legislation, Jonathan Hall KC, told Sky News there are issues around transparency.

“I do think there is a problem when you have people whose relationship with the country that they’re left with is really technical and they may never have realised that they had that citizenship before and may never gone to that country,” he said.

“Me and my predecessors have all said, owing to how frequently this power is used, it should be something that the independent reviewer should have the power to review. I asked, my predecessor asked, we’ve both been told no, so I agree there’s a lack of transparency.”

No automatic reversal

Even if the government does remove HTS from the terror list, it would not automatically invalidate decisions to deprive people of their citizenship.

Macer Gifford gave up a career as a banker in London to join the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) as a foreign volunteer between 2015 and 2017.

He told Sky News that decisions “made years ago in the interest of the British public have to remain”.

“We can’t sort of go through previous cases nitpicking through it, wasting time and money to bring it up to date,” he added.

“We can’t be naive because the intent to go out, the decision to go in itself is a huge decision for them. So it shows commitment when they’re there, they then, if they take an active participation in the organisations that they’ve been accused of joining, again, that involves training and perseverance and dedication to the cause.”

But those born and raised in Britain, who joined the same cause, and lost their citizenship as a result, might reasonably ask why that should remain the case.

UK

Criminals could be banned from pubs and sports grounds under new plans

Published

9 hours ago

August 24, 2025

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Criminals could be banned from pubs and sports grounds under new plans

Criminals face being banned from pubs, sports grounds and concerts under new government plans to give judges powers to pass tougher community sentences.

The new measures, which would apply to people in England and Wales, “should remind all offenders that, under this government, crime does not pay”, Justice Secretary Shabana Mahmood said.

Offenders’ freedom could also be curtailed with limits on driving, travel bans and restriction zones confining them to specific areas, the government said.

Similar measures could also apply to prisoners let out on licence, while drug testing would be expanded to include all those released, rather than just those with a history of substance misuse.

While judges are currently able to impose limited bans for specific crimes, such as football bans for crimes committed inside a stadium on match day, the new measures would allow for such bans to be handed down for any offence.

The justice secretary said: “When criminals break society’s rules, they must be punished.

“Those serving their sentences in the community must have their freedom restricted there too.

“These new punishments should remind all offenders that, under this government, crime does not pay.

“Rightly, the public expect the government to do everything in its power to keep Britain safe, and that’s what we’re doing.”

The proposals are part of the Labour government’s efforts to tackle overcrowding in prisons.

Back in June, it emerged that prisoners were to be transferred to lower security jails in an effort to ease overcrowding, as part of a new measure quietly unveiled by the government.

Sky News reported earlier this month how the prison system was close to collapse on a number of occasions between autumn 2023 and summer 2024, according to an independent review by former chief inspector of prisons, Dame Anne Owers.

The report said there was a systemic problem which has led to recurring prison capacity crises over the last 18 years.

UK

Police separate anti-immigration and anti-racism protesters across the country

Published

22 hours ago

August 23, 2025

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Police separate anti-immigration and anti-racism protesters across the country

Protesters have gathered across the country as groups demonstrated against asylum seeker housing and were met by anti-racism campaigners.

Demonstrations under the Abolish Asylum System slogan were held in England, Scotland and Wales, including in Bristol, Exeter, Tamworth, Cannock, Aberdeen, Mold, Perth, Nuneaton, Liverpool, Wakefield, Newcastle, Horley and Canary Wharf.

Counter-protests were also organised by campaign group Stand Up to Racism.

In Bristol, mounted police separated the two groups in the Castle Park, with officers scuffling with protesters.

Police kept around 200 anti-immigration protesters draped in English flags away from roughly 50 Stand Up to Racism protesters in Horley, Surrey.

One man, wearing a West Ham United football shirt, was held by police as he yelled: “You’re not welcome here, you’re not welcome here, you’re not welcome here” at anti-racism protesters.

Anti-immigration protesters also chanted: “Tommy, Tommy, Tommy, Tommy Robinson” in support of the far-right activist, whose real name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon.

The anti-racism protesters chanted “say it loud, say it clear, refugees are welcome here” and held signs calling for solidarity and to “stop deportations”.

The Stand Up to Racism protesters were shepherded into a smaller area as they continued to chant: “No hate, no fear, refugees are welcome here”, which was met with “No they’re f****** not” from the other side of the street.

In Perth, protesters gathered outside the Radisson Hotel.

The anti-migration protesters held up signs with slogans such as “Perth is full – empty the hotels” and “get them out”.

Stand Up to Racism Scotland said it had achieved “victory” in Perth, with more than 200 gathering to oppose the Abolish Asylum System demonstration.

In Liverpool, a dispersal order was issued to try and contain the protests.

Saturday’s events come amid continued tension around the use of the hotels for asylum seekers.

Regular protests had been held outside the Bell Hotel in Epping, Essex, which started after an asylum seeker housed there was charged with sexually assaulting a 14-year-old girl on 10 July.

Hadush Gerberslasie Kebatu, 38, was charged with trying to kiss a teenage girl and denies the allegations. He is due to stand trial later this month.

In the wake of those protests, Epping Forest District Council sought and won an interim High Court injunction to stop migrants from being accommodated there – a decision which the government is seeking permission to appeal.