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Local Authority Grant Reductions (Excel format, 84 Kb)

• Departments: 

• Communities and Local Government

Document type: 

Information

Date of publication: 

10 June 2010

Summary: 

This document gives details of grant reductions to individual local authorities.

• Subjects: 

• Benefits; 
• Consumers, business and industry; 
• Economic development; 
• Economics and finance; 
• Education and skills; 
• Emergencies; 
• Employment, jobs and careers; 
• Environment; 
• European and international affairs; 
• Government and public administration; 
• Health, well-being and care; 
• Housing; 
• Information and communication; 
• Leisure and culture; 
• Performance management; 
• Planning, land and premises; 
• Public order, justice and rights; 
• Regional policy; 
• Social issues; 
• Transport and infrastructure; 
• e-Government

• 
  Regions: 

• National; 
• East Midlands; 
• East of England; 
• London; 
• North East; 
• North West; 
• South East; 
• South West; 
• West Midlands; 
• Yorkshire and The Humber

http://www.info4local.gov.uk/documents/publications/1611480

Councils may get a bigger role in health commissioning, under government plans to radically scale back the role of primary care trusts.

The coalition's programme for government included plans to transfer many of PCTs' commissioning responsibilities to groups of GPs, which would make family doctors councils' key partners in integrating health and social care.

In an interview with doctors.net.uk, reported today by Health Service Journal, health secretary Andrew Lansley said that councils could help support GPs in commissioning health services, saying local authorities' role in commissioning social care "might make that quite a viable option". It would be up to GPs to decide whether to seek support from councils, or from PCTs or other organisations.

The plan to transfer commissioning powers from PCTs to GPs has been criticised by the chair of the Local Government Association's improvement board, David Parsons, who said that it would weaken democratic accountability in the NHS.

However, giving councils responsibility for commissioning support for GPs could address this concern.

Related articles

Opinion: Social workers in surgeries will not work

http://www.communitycare.co.uk/Articles/2010/06/10/114687/Councils-may-g...

A shake-up in government support for disabled and other benefit claimants seeking work will go live next summer, employment minister Chris Grayling said today.

In a ministerial statement, Grayling said the Work Programme, which will merge all existing employment support programmes for benefit claimants, would be launched by the summer of 2011.

A number of existing programmes for disabled people would be replaced, including

Pathways to Work, Workstep, New Deal for Disabled PeopleWork Preparation and the Job Introduction Scheme, will either be merged into the scheme at the time or phased in, to ensure continuity of provision.

However, the government is yet to confirm whether it will carry forward its predecessor's plans to launch Work Choice, a new employment support programme for disabled job seekers, this October.

This would merge Workstep, Work Preparation and the Job Introduction Scheme. The previous government announced preferred bidders in March, which includes Shaw Trust.

Grayling said: "We are committed to supporting severely disabled people and are currently reviewing the best way of doing this."

Grayling added that the government had written to affected providers and will discuss the implications for them on a one-to-one basis.

He said Work Programme would provide "significant opportunities" for private and voluntary sector providers "to deliver truly flexible and personalised support" and particularly highlighted the role of the voluntary sector.

Related articles

NAO slams failure of pathways to cut incapacity benefit count

Incapacity benefit claimants to face 'flawed' assessment

http://www.communitycare.co.uk/Articles/2010/06/10/114684/Welfare-shake-...

Plans to introduce medical assessments for disability living allowance claimants, announced in today's Budget, may not reduce the benefits bill, as intended.

The proposal, unveiled today by chancellor George Osborne, will be introduced for new and existing claimants from 2013 and is designed to save £360m in 2013-14 and £1,075m in 2014-15.

However, the Office for Budgetary Responsibility, set up by the coalition to scrutinise public spending and taxation, identified disability benefits as one of three areas where the impact of policies announced today by Osborne were uncertain.

Currently, DLA claimants must complete a 59-page form and submit supporting medical evidence for their claim.

In his speech to the House of Commons, Osborne said the proposed assessment would be "a simple process rather than the complex forms [disabled people] have to fill out at the moment".

However, Mark Shrimpton, deputy chief executive of disability charity Radar, said: "They are making a gut reaction but they have no understanding of what the real impact will be."

Shrimpton added Radar could not support yet another assessment regime arguing there should be a single point of access to all benefits. He said: "Neither the taxpayer nor disabled people should support these multiple, expensive, exhausting and unnecessary burdens of bureaucracy."

Neil Coyle, director of policy at Disability Alliance, said it was "highly likely" that the assessment used would be the much-criticised work capability assessment, which is used to determine eligibility for employment and support allowance, the replacement for incapacity benefit.

Coyle said the WCA was "generating significant concern for its inability to recognise the impact an impairment or health condition has on a disabled person's life".

Osborne said three times as many people claimed DLA now as when it was introduced 18 years ago.

However, Rich Watts, director of operations at the Essex Coalition of Disabled People, responded on his blog, Arbitrary Constant, that this reflected the fact that more disabled people were living independently than in residential care. He said "effectively cutting DLA risks reversing this rise in independent living".

Osborne also announced that housing benefit will, from April 2011, be paid to disabled people requiring an extra room to support a carer.

He also promised that full proposals on welfare reform will be announced by October this year, when the government publishes its spending review, which will set out public expenditure limits for 2011-12 to 2014-15.

Related articles

Incapacity benefit claimants to face 'flawed' work assessment

Welfare: Coalition to pursue controversial plans

Coalition expected to keep disabled back-to-work programme

http://www.communitycare.co.uk/Articles/2010/06/23/114776/medical-assess...

The government has been forced to suspend its new spending cuts website after it allowed members of the public to post offensive comments about disabled people – and then failed to remove them.

The Treasury’s Spending Challenge website received more than 15,000 suggestions about how to cut public spending in the first five days after it was opened to the public last week.
But many of the suggestions included offensive comments such as describing disabled people as “spongers” and “too lazy to work” and calling for disability benefits to be cut back “to the bare minimum”, as well as a stream of offensive remarks about other minorities.

Despite claiming the website was being moderated – checked for suitability – the Treasury failed to remove any of the 23 offensive posts about disabled people that were revealed by a brief search of the site by Disability News Service.
One person who posted a comment said that if disabled people can drive “they can afford to buy and run their own car and not sponge off the hard working taxpayers”.

Another proposed that all disability living allowance (DLA) claimants should be give a month’s work to do at home and “if the work has not been completed when collection due, DLA benefit can be reduced accordingly”.

A third proposed that the mobility component of DLA and attendance allowance should be scrapped, with half of the money given to councils and the other half used to pay off the budget deficit.

Yet another called for new criteria for DLA and incapacity benefit in order to “take some people from the ‘disabled’ bracket and put them into the ‘too lazy to work’ bracket”.
And one asked: “Why do we have to pay out large sums of money each month so that disabled individuals can drive around in big, brand new over-priced mobility cars which are ‘free’ to them on the Motability scheme?”

Another said disabled people who received benefits should be given “bare minimum, just enough to live on, without luxury”, with another suggesting the number of people entitled to disability benefits should be “cut to a bare minimum”.

Furious disabled activists said they believed the government had breached its duty to promote disability equality and eliminate harassment under the Disability Discrimination Act, by failing to police the site properly.

Both the Treasury and the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) were flooded with complaints about the site. The EHRC has now passed the complaints to its legal enforcement team “for consideration”.

An EHRC spokeswoman said: “We are taking a lot of complaints. The Treasury are bound by the public sector duty [to eliminate harassment and promote equality]. They have a responsibility that they have to live up to.”

Mark White, who runs the campaigning website The Political Cripple, said: “I have been fielding a number of calls from disabled people who are extremely upset that a government site is allowing hate crime.

“We have had to deal with negative stereotyping of disabled people for far too long. It is just unbelievable that the government is providing a venue for it to occur all over again.”

Fellow disabled activist Adam Lotun said disabled people were shocked that the government had allowed “bigoted, ill-informed and nauseating comments to pervade the site”.  
RADAR said it was appalled by the “offensive and prejudiced suggestions and comments” on the site, and the failure to remove them.

Liz Sayce, chief executive of RADAR, said: “Disabled people have plenty of ideas for efficiencies – for instance, reducing the unnecessary multiple assessments we face to one single assessment, saving the government billions of pounds in the process.

“Neither they, nor any other minority group, should be confronted by ill-informed, offensive and dangerous nonsense from prejudiced people.”

A Treasury spokeswoman said there were “strict guidelines in place to ensure any inappropriate comments are removed”, and added: “We know there have been some inappropriate comments and a dedicated team are working through to pull them down.”

But despite her claims, all of the comments above – which were all posted between 9 and 12 July – were still on the website on 15 July.

Access to the website was suspended later that day (15 July).
Another Treasury spokeswoman admitted that the site had been “temporarily suspended so we can moderate what’s on it”, but neither she nor her colleague were available to answer further questions.

News provided by John Pring at www.disabilitynewsservice.com

http://www.dls.org.uk/rights/News/july/12.html

Tomorrow (Wednesday 11th August) it will be three months since the coalition Government was established and David Cameron became Prime Minister.  During the election, the TaxPayers' Alliance published a manifesto which set out our objectives for this Parliament.  We promised then that we would judge any new Government against that standard.

Today the TPA publishes its assessment of the Government's progress so far.  The new report judges the Government's performance on every objective in our manifesto and assigns a score out of five, from zero - no progress at all - to five - where the objective has been satisfied or a clear path has been set out for that to happen.

The full report can be found online here

Even on the 3 month objectives, our assessment finds that in every area good progress has been made against some objectives but lacking in others.  For example:

• In tax and spending, the Government has cut advertising spending in half (5/5) and abolished a number of quangos (3/5) but has not scrapped the 50p tax rate (0/5) or instituted clear fiscal rules with expenditure targets (1/5).

• In reforming services, the Government has cancelled Prevent grants through local authorities (5/5) but has kept the 0.7% target for foreign aid spending (1/5).

• In democracy and transparency, the Government have set out plans to publish full data on spending (5/5) but have not taken action on taxpayer funding for the unions (0/5) or started EU reforms (1/5).

In the rest of this Parliament, the TaxPayers’ Alliance will continue to campaign on the objectives set out in our manifesto.  In those areas where good progress has been made so far we will work to ensure that the initial promise is delivered upon, in other areas we will campaign for change.

To read the press release, please click here

For the full report, please click here

Matthew Elliott, Chief Executive of the TaxPayers' Alliance, said:

"It is hypocritical for firebrand trade union leaders to be calling for strikes and higher taxes while they themselves live a life of well-paid luxury. It is small wonder that they aren't worried about the tax burden or the national debt when they are so well-off, but it is ordinary, over-stretched taxpayers who will suffer if they get their way. Their bluster should be ignored, and the Government should stop pouring taxpayers' money into union coffers, as they clearly have more than enough cash already."

http://www.taxpayersalliance.com/home/

The UK's councils could do the same amount of work with 500,000 fewer staff if they matched the productivity of private firms, a report has claimed.

Junior staff in local authorities were, on average, productive only 32% of the time during working hours, said management consultancy Knox D'Arcy.

It said this compared with an average of 44% in the private sector.

Knox D'Arcy, which carried out 1,855 workers' surveys, said firms had better systems to ensure targets were met.

"Put simply, by matching average private sector staff utilisation levels, local government could increase its productivity by roughly a third," said Paul Weekes, the report's author and principal consultant at Knox D'Arcy.

"This sort of dramatic increase would help significantly offset the cuts that are on the agenda as part of the Government's austerity package."

John Ransford, chief executive of the Local Government Group - which is made up of six organisations representing councils in England and Wales - said local authorities had been "achieving efficiency savings year-on-year".

"With shrinking resources and increasing demand for services, councils are already looking at how they can protect vital frontline services by delivering more for less, and how they can provide greater value for money for taxpayers," he said.

He added that they had already set out to the government a programme of reform that could "deliver billions of pounds worth of savings by axing costly middlemen and stripping away unnecessary bureaucracy".

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-11034769

Government implements saving ideas submitted through the Spending Challenge

These are the first to be introduced and will help the Government reduce the deficit.

The three ideas are examples of how the common-sense suggestions, submitted to the Government through the Spending Challenge website, can make savings for the taxpayer and help the Government reduce the deficit and rebalance the country’s economy.

The three ideas being introduced are:

1. To reduce the number of CRB checks for Junior Doctors, by taking a more common- sense approach across the NHS, so that junior doctors are not checked repeatedly over a short space of time. This will save up to a £1 million a year and cut administrative burdens for the NHS;

2. To distribute National Insurance numbers to people with a letter rather than a plastic card, saving Government up to a £1 million per year;

3. Increase the selling of surplus and second hand Government equipment by expanding the use of the MoDs eDisposals service for use across all Government departments and the piloting of an online auction site.

All of these ideas were submitted through the Government’s Spending Challenge website. The Government has received over 100,000 ideas through the Spending Challenge. Over 63,000 have come from public sector employees and the rest from the general public website.

Speaking after meeting some of the people who submitted these ideas, the Chancellor George Osborne MP, said:
“These are the people’s ideas. Over 100,000 suggestions have been put to us and now we’re starting to put some of them into practice. In doing so, we are directly tapping the experience of those working in the frontline of public services instead of assuming Ministers in Whitehall have all the answers.

“No one idea will solve the problems we face, but taken together they can make a real contribution to reducing the deficit and rebalancing the country’s economy at a crucial time. People’s ideas will have a real impact on the tough decisions ahead.”

Other ideas submitted through the Spending Challenge are being considered by the relevant Government department. If they offer an opportunity to make practical savings for the Government, they may be introduced as part of the Spending Review this autumn.

Notes for Editors

Changes to the National Insurance Number Card:

1. In 2011, the Government will introduce a new system for distributing National Insurance numbers to people which will see the plastic National Insurance number card replaced with a letter.

2. In the interim, a letter will be sent instead of replacement cards, saving £100,000 in 2010/11.

3. HMRC issues young people a National Insurance number card (NINO card) at the age of 15 years and 9 months, to migrant workers within the UK and also issues replacement cards to people who request one.

4. Initial estimates show that the replacement of a plastic NINO card with a letter will provide savings of up to £1 million per annum in the upfront costs to HMRC.

5. The NINO card is not a recognised form of ID within the UK, but is simply a reminder to the holder of the card of their National Insurance number. The replacement of the NINO with a letter would only replace the physical form in which this reminder was produced.

Changes to CRB checks for Junior Doctors:

6. The Government will establish a more common-sense approach to CRB checks for Junior Doctors, reducing the costs incurred by the NHS when a Junior Doctor moves position as part of their training. Currently, NHS employers regularly make CRB checks every time a Doctor moves position and, as Junior Doctors move every 6 months as part of their training, this increases costs and administrative burden for the NHS.

7. The Department of Health will now make sure that NHS employers are aware that they can take a more common sense approach to CRB checks and allow existing CRB checks to be used, simplifying checks for Junior Doctors and reducing costs. NHS employers will continue to require the normal references and other pre-employment checks that they should be undertaking in any case. 

8. The change to CRB checks for junior doctors will save up to £1million a year for the NHS.
Selling on surplus Government equipment through an online auction site:

9. The Government will now pilot the use of an online auction site to sell on surplus and second hand Government equipment.

10. The Cabinet Office and the MOD will launch a pilot project this autumn that will develop the existing MOD eDisposals service, including the eDisposals website, for use across all Government departments. The website will allow all Government departments to sell on old or unused equipment so that the money made can be reinvested in public services.

http://nds.coi.gov.uk/content/detail.aspx?NewsAreaId=2&ReleaseID=415410&...

Budget cuts and children in poverty - don't overlook the smaller things

The level of cuts being imposed by the government to tackle the national deficit shouldn't be described as swingeing, savage or draconian – indeed they are modest, according to City economist Dr Tim Morgan.

Government spending in 2015/16 will be £686bn in real terms, Morgan said, meaning that spending will be higher then than it was in 2009. And while spending in unprotected departments will fall in real terms in the next five years this will be by just 7 per cent.

Published by the Centre for Policy Studies (CPS), Morgan's report – called 'A shower, not a hurricane: the modest nature of the proposed cuts' – said that cutbacks will only reverse over five years a comparatively small part of the "enormous real-terms increase" that took place over the preceding decade. In 1999/2000, government spending was £343bn, a figure which would, had it only moved in line with inflation, have reached about £450bn by 2009/10. But actual spending in that year had risen to £669bn, a 53 per cent increase in real terms, Morgan pointed out.

The spending plans outlined in the 2010 June budget reduce real-terms outlays from a projected £697bn this year to £686bn in 2015/16 (in 2010/11 prices). Interest payments and the political decision to maintain health and foreign aid budgets means that spending by unprotected departments will fall in real terms from £523bn this year to £485bn by 2015/16, what Morgan called "a less than terrifying correction".

He added, however, that the alternatives to these cuts were far worse: higher government borrowing would almost certainly entail much higher interest rates, further quantitative easing would risk a surge in inflation and huge tax rises would seriously undermine economic competitiveness.

CPS director Jill Kirby said: "As public and media anxiety builds in anticipation of the Comprehensive Spending Review, it's important to keep a sense of proportion. Returning to fiscal reality after the Labour government's huge spending spree is clearly necessary, but the overall fall in real terms spending will be modest. By concentrating on reductions in administration – a category of expenditure which ballooned under Labour – the fall-out from the CSR need not be dramatic."

http://www.publicservice.co.uk/news_story.asp?id=14452

Government departments will always need to call in consultants who offer specialist skills that may not be available in-house but it is very worrying that some departments have failed to grow the skills they need, leaving them heavily reliant on outside help, the Public Accounts Committee has said. It added that relying on consultants for commonly needed skills was expensive and repeated use of them suggested poor value for money.

The committee said that the Cabinet Office had not done enough to increase government's core skills despite recommendations to do so in 2002 and 2007. The MPs accepted that it takes time to grow such skills but there should have been more progress after 16 years. Particularly worrying was that IT and programme and project management consultancy had increased from 50 per cent to 60 per cent of all consultancy spend since 2006/07. Where skills do exist within government, the committee said, departments lack the knowledge and flexibility to deploy people to where they are needed. Also, pressure to cut training budgets may affect departments' ability to develop the internal skills they need, reflecting a short-term financial cut leading to longer term unnecessary spending.

Reacting to the statistic that spending on consultants and interims by central government departments was more than £1bn in 2009-10, the committee said it was not clear why some departments used consultants more than others: for every £100 spent on staff costs, the Department for Transport spent £70 on consultants, a very high proportion when compared to HM Revenue and Customs which spent only £2. Central government had no idea about how arms length bodies used consultants, nor did it have any up to date data on their spending. The National Audit Office estimated that arms length bodies spent at least £700m on consultancy in 2009/10.

Committee chair Margaret Hodge said: "Despite spending over £1bn a year on consultants and interim staff, central government departments are largely in the dark about whether this represents value for money. There are of course legitimate reasons for a department to buy in specialist skills where they are in short supply internally. But departments have become too reliant on buying in core skills rather than developing them in their own staff.

"Some departments depend far more on consultants than others. In itself, that is not surprising. What is unacceptable is the poor understanding of whether the extent of a department's use of consultants is justified by the nature of its business. Why should the Department for Transport, for instance, be so dependent on consultants?"

http://www.publicservice.co.uk/news_story.asp?id=15061