Introduction

As discussed in Chapter One, local authorities in England have been faced with the twin crises of managing housing demand and supply and responding to super- austerity. Severe budget cuts have occurred in authorities in England, and many other places internationally. As this book has demonstrated, local authorities in England have taken a range of initiatives to respond to austerity. These have been institutional, through the restructuring of the form of local government, including the creation of new unitary authorities or merging council administrations, as well as involving a range of direct activities to meet specific needs such as for housing and to generate more income through property acquisition and investment to provide a more secure and balanced income stream for the future. The extent to which local authorities have engaged in these asset and income generation approaches has varied, as we have found. However, it is also the case that, while starting with some initiatives, councils have continued to extend their activities in a cumulative way, as they gain more confidence and learn from others.

While the period of austerity for local authorities that started in 2010 was accompanied by uncertainty and responses to service and staff cutting that had been used before, the scale of the government's programme for reducing funding for local authorities was on a scale that had not been seen before (NAO, 2019). The government sought to use the financial weakness of local government, which subsequently followed, to impose a more centralised approach to the selection and delivery of its preferred projects through a programme of ‘deals’ – city deals and growth deals for example – but these were not enough to fill the gaps and required resources to develop and implement them that local authorities no longer had. Meanwhile, the basic services were increasingly closed, passed to the management of the community or reduced to the bare minimum.

Latterly in this period, the government diverted its attention to Brexit, and since 2016, the internal Conservative Party dynamics and its parliamentary challenges have left local authorities to fend for themselves. The local authority Revenue Support Grant (RSG) continued to reduce on its waning taper with the prospect of final closure of the RSG in 2020. At the same time, in the Homelessness Reduction Act 2017, all councils were given greater responsibilities for those who might become homeless.