Bradford Council leader doubles down on reason for 10% council tax hike: blame 14 years of Conservative austerity

Does she have a point?

The leader of Bradford Council has once again defended its decision to raise council tax in the district to 9.99%, blaming its precarious financial situation as an unnecessary consequence of the previous Conservative government’s much-criticised austerity programme, which a 2019 UN report described as being a “policy pursued more as an ideological than an economic agenda”.

In a recent YouTube video, the Labour leader of the council, Susan Hinchcliffe, said that the policies put in place by Tories – which the same UN report said had badly damaged the social safety net of the country through drastic cuts to local authority budgets – “had left Bradford in a really challenging situation”.

“350 million has been taken off Bradford over that time,” she explained. “And that has meant we have had to cut services back much more than we’d like and it also means that our income levels – we’ve got one of the lowest council taxes in the country – has just not been able to increase in line with that reduction in government grants.

“The choice is simple. Either pay £2 to £3 extra a week today or pay £111 million extra in costs of borrowing over the next 20 years. We know this is hard for people. People have had a cost of living crisis and it’s still hard out there. What we’re doing is making sure there’s hardship payments for people on the lowest incomes to make sure people can get through this really difficult time.”

According to the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS), while there had been an overall increase in funding for local authorities between 2019 and 2024, the term of the last parliament – which had three prime ministers in Boris Johnson, Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak – it had not reversed the deep cuts made in the 2010s. Spending on many services, the report said, is still down by as much as 40%.

“During the 2010s, councils’ overall core funding per person fell by 26% in real terms, on average, with higher council tax revenues only partially offsetting a 46% fall in funding from central government,” the IFS explained in June 2024. “But these cuts affected areas differently: in the most deprived tenth of councils, funding per person fell by 35%, compared with 15% in the least deprived areas.”

Further research from the London School of Economics, also published in June last year, concluded that austerity resulted in about “190,000 excess deaths, or a 3% increase in mortality rates, from 2010 to 2019”.

“Austerity cuts not only negatively affected overall life expectancy – they also disproportionately impacted the most vulnerable people in the UK,” the paper's authors elaborated.

“Before 2010, the average life expectancy gap between more and less affected areas was stable at about 1.6 years. By 2019, this gap had widened to 1.9 years. Areas hit hardest by welfare cuts, typically those with a high number of benefit claimants, experienced slower increases or even decreases in life expectancy, in contrast to regions less affected by austerity, which saw better health outcomes.”

In 2024, after a landslide general election that saw Labour return to government, the Institute for Government said that local government “bore a disproportionate share of spending cuts in the 2010s”.

“Local government is one of the few areas of public services where spending remains lower in real terms in 2024/25 than it was in 2010/11,” it went on to say. “This has had widespread and profound consequences for the quality and accessibility of local authority services, leaving residents across England struggling to access – or receiving poor-quality service from – adult and children’s social care, local road maintenance, libraries, planning departments, recycling and homelessness services, among others.”

Moreover, Hinchcliffe’s argument for initiatives like council tax increases is seen as somewhat avoidable in an environment where, as the Institute for Government explained, overall finances for local authorities have become “unsustainable”. It’s why, in part, we’ve seen local authorities end up in a position where they’ve had to issue section 114 notices, effectively declaring themselves bankrupt (Bradford Council was close to issuing one before being somewhat rescued by the central government, which gave it, along with other councils, exceptional financial support in early 2024).

“We have a clear five-year strategy to address our budget shortfall and achieve financial sustainability,” Hinchcliffe said earlier this month. “As part of this strategy, we need to find savings or income equivalent to around £40 million next year and £50 million per year for the following four years.   

“We are trying wherever possible to find new ways of working and new funding sources so that we can save money for council taxpayers without cutting vital services.”

In November last year, Labour announced plans to reform council funding to “help fix the foundations of local government”, describing the current approach as both outdated and inefficient.

“Implementation of these reforms will take place alongside multi-year funding settlements, the first in 10 years come 2026-2027, allowing local authorities the certainty to plan and invest for the long-term,” the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government said at the time.

“The number of funding pots will also be reduced to allow councils to have more flexibility to judge local priorities, to meet the needs of local people, and to decide how best to deliver on national priorities.