What’s going on with the West Sussex County Council budget?

County councillors are meeting today to set the council’s budget for 2023/24. While this May will mark six years since I decided to step down as a county councillor, I continue to run through their budget each year and I believe there are two big reasons why every Crawley resident should also take an interest.

The first reason is that while Crawley Borough Council is legally required to collect it, West Sussex County Council sets the majority of our local council tax. For every £1 of our council tax 78p goes to the county council (9p of which badged as the ‘Adult Social Care’ precept, although it makes no meaningful difference), a proportion which will be increasing this year. With the majority of Crawley’s local taxes going to West Sussex, it’s worth knowing what they plan to do with it.

The second reason is that West Sussex County Council are responsible for providing half of Crawley’s local services, services which people rely upon daily, and services people regularly complain are not up to scratch. When I train up new Labour activists to canvass, I joke with them that if people have a local issue they want to raise it’s probably West Sussex’s fault. Given that Labour has run Crawley Borough Council since 2014, you might expect me to want to deflect the blame, but the reality is that almost every single time some raises an issue with me on the doorstep it is something that only the county council have the powers to fix. Road maintenance, pavements and cycle paths, streetlighting, social services and adult social care, waste disposal (while the borough collects it, only the county can decide what we collect), etc. All services the county is responsible for and all things people aren’t happy with. Their budget really matters.

In theory, this year West Sussex has a relatively easy ride. The Local Government Settlement, the statement once a year as to what funding councils will receive, for the year was overall roughly in-line with inflation. This is even more clear when you look at the split in this funding, with districts and boroughs like Crawley receiving a real-terms cut, with county councils receiving an above inflation increase.

As a side note, it’s worth just highlighting that the Local Government Settlement isn’t just about grants from central government, it looks at the whole picture of funding coming in to councils from sources like grants, retained business rates and council tax. Whatever amount the Government says a council is receiving is a figure which assumes that council will increase their share of council tax by the maximum permissible amount, rather than grant funding. I guess most public money eventually comes out of tax, but all-too-often we find the Conservatives paying for a cut in progressive income taxation (with greater taxation of those who earn more) with systems which excessively penalise those on regular and lower incomes, like VAT and council tax.

The maximum permissible amount for WSCC is 5% (3% as regular council tax and 2% as ‘Adult Social Care’ precept), so they will be increasing their council tax by 4.99% (the 0.01% difference is due rules around how the figure is split between the bands).

Why then, if their budget is increasing above inflation, is WSCC making cuts? The non-partisan response is that the council is facing increasing expenditure above inflation, particularly when it comes to Adult Social Care, so even an increasing budget isn’t enough. The UK has an ageing population, that comes with a greater draw on the pension system and increasing health needs in old age. On top of this, the economic shift we saw with the collapse of British industry under Margaret Thatcher forcing younger people to move away from their parents to find work and you have a growing demand for Government resources for the elderly, with an increasingly small working population left to fill the jobs either directly meeting those needs or paying for it through taxation (whatever your view on immigration, increasing restrictions will inevitably make this problem worse over time, the economics of this is very clear). The last 4/5 Conservative Prime Ministers have each promised to solve social care (it has been a manifesto com, but with no solution so far forthcoming we end up essentially paying for adult social care through blocked hospital beds and councils having to close down all their other services to keep the funding flowing.

Don’t get me wrong, in the four years I acted as the finance-lead for Labour on the county council, opposed many decisions where it seemed clear to me that the Conservatives’ approach would be storing up worse problems for the rooster and typically those chickens came home to roost. Had they adopted the approach we did at Crawley Borough Council of working to boost the council’s income rather than going straight for cuts to balance the budget, they would have given themselves more room in the future to make ends meet. However, the bad decisions taken by Conservative leaders back to at least when our current MP, Henry Smith, was running the council (for anyone who doubts this, compare the council’s debt levels when he took control to what they were when he resigned, no one has done more to indebt the council in its 135 year history), has done much to reduce West Sussex’s future options.

For the reasons already covered, the cuts this year are minimal by historical standards proposing £9.6m of savings. To put that number into context, WSCC’s net revenue expenditure after the savings will still be £648m, a real terms cut of around £100m since 2010. Looking through the list of ‘savings’, most–on the surface at least–seem reasonable by historical standards, arguing that the money can be taken from the budget won’t impact upon service delivery either due to services being redesigned or funding covered in other ways. The big question is whether or not that is going to pan out in reality and what if it doesn’t. If the ‘Family Safeguarding Model’ doesn’t result in the savings needed will we need to take on more social workers and run over budget, or will children be put at risk because the provision isn’t there. If the concessionary travel budget runs out, will OAPs be left unable to use their free bus pass for the last few months of the year? Unfortunately, the detail isn’t there.

The reality is that it isn’t the savings in themselves which is likely to be the biggest issue, it’s that many services are already crying out for better investment, the most visible examples being roads and pavement maintenance, and however long austerity continues to be imposed upon us by Conservative central government, and however long Conservative councillors are willing to just accept it, county council services will continue to dominate the complaints raised by local residents.

I plan on writing about Crawley Borough Council’s budget in time for our next Full Council meeting, but for those who are interested in making a comparison, the version set to be discussed is without frontline cuts, proposes a much lower council tax increase than that of WSCC, and does so despite central government again delivering a real-terms cut in our funding. This follows the same pattern we have seen in the town every year since Labour regained control of the council, throughout a period the Conservatives have continually run the county council.

You can draw your own conclusions, but if you are a resident in Furnace Green, Pound Hill, or Three Bridges, you might like to note that the councillors up for election this May also happen to be your Conservative representatives on West Sussex County Council. They would love your support to bring the county council’s approach over to Crawley Borough Council.