In an article from the Public Sector Executive (PSE) talks about a report published by the Institute for Government that looks into how the funding of all local and combined authorities can be improved, whilst warning why the current method doesn’t work.
The report, titled Funding Local Growth in England, has claimed that local growth is being held up by the government’s ‘over-reliance’ on competitive bidding over local and combined authority funding. This has been explored in three different features of the funding landscape, which the IfG claims is undermining the government’s attempts to fund levelling up and other priorities.
These three features include the fact that there is a wide range of different funding methods available to authorities, but these have tight ringfences inhibiting how the money can be spent, as well as the fact that funding is often only for the short-term. The report has found that almost half of the grants that were issued in 2022/23 were due to expire after a year, with this making it harder to achieve stability or long-term planning.