Betts slams ministers over council spending calculations

The government has been accused of “playing fast and loose” with data relating to council funding cuts by the chairman of a House of Commons select committee.
Clive Betts, chairman of the DCLG committee, insisted that ministers have repeatedly failed to set out the full calculations behind a claim in the 2013 spending round that local government expenditure would only fall by 2.3% between 2014/15 and 2015/16.
He said that differing methodologies meant that his committee and the public have had no opportunity to properly scrutinise proposed reductions to funding for councils from central government.
He said: “An essential part of select committee scrutiny is testing the government’s figures.
“It is frustrating that the government has an established measure for presenting local government spending power but, rather than use that method – I assume because the figure wasn’t rosy enough – the prime minister comes up with a ‘better’ figure based on an unexplained new methodology.”
In February, Betts wrote to communities secretary Eric Pickles complaining about a plethora of different figures used by the government to measure local government finance, saying: “I am at a loss to understand why ministers cannot present figures on a consistent basis.”
He also complained that one set of figures included £1.2bn financed from local authority reserves in 2013/14, compared to just £20.7m in 2012/13, “which surely cannot be seen as a sustainable source of finance.”
Separate information provided by local government minister Brandon Lewis contained figures including “mandatory housing benefits and expenditure linked to other specific grants outside aggregate external finance over which local authorities have no control”.
Pickles replied in June, saying: “To clarify, the figure of £1.2bn is the amount budgeted for by local authorities at the start of the year. The final outturn position, as in the case of last year where local authorities added £2.6bn to their reserves, may indeed differ substantially.”
He concluded: “You are right that there are a number of different measures used for local government finance.
“The most widely used measure is spending power as it takes account of a wide range of revenue available to local authorities including central government grants and local taxes.
“However, it is important that other measures are collected so that our policy development analytical base is made up of a wide range of measures providing differing perspectives on local authority total expenditure.”
This week, Betts said that he was not satisfied by this explanation.
He said: “Over recent years, the government has produced an array of different figures on local government finance.
“Ministers have to stop quoting whichever figure best suits their argument on any given occasion.
“Without an agreed single measure of local government spending power there can be no public transparency or open debate on council funding.”
Betts said that the government’s established “spending power” measure shows a real terms reduction of 3.3% between 2014/15 and 2015/16, and that the 2.3% figure related to a new measure of local government spending invented by the Treasury.
He said: “In spite of my repeated requests, the government will still not provide a full breakdown of how this figure was calculated.
“My committee cannot carry out effective scrutiny if the government chooses to play fast and loose with important data on public funding.”