Nottingham could lose out on funding to the tune of £14m under new arrangements proposed by the Government.
The blow comes on top of a decade of Government austerity which has seen Nottingham hit harder than more affluent areas – and the new funding proposals would only make this worse.
The so-called Fair Funding Formula would not taking deprivation fully into account when distributing funds to local councils, and would also ignore extra funding pressures for large urban areas like Nottingham, such as homelessness and looked after children. The Local Government Association, Core Cities and similar councils to Nottingham believe this approach would make a bad situation even worse. The City Council has joined them in raising its concerns with Government over its proposals.
Research by the University of Liverpool shows that the Government’s proposal would leave Nottingham with a loss of £14m, or £42 per head, while the richest areas would gain £24 per head.
City Council Deputy Leader, Cllr Graham Chapman, said: “For the last ten years, this Government has been taking away from the areas in the Midlands and north that need help the most and giving to richer areas in the south and south-east. For example, this year Nottingham lost £529 per household and Surrey gained £19 per household. Then there’s a special transition fund which Surrey benefited from to the tune of £24m, while Nottingham received nothing whatsoever.
“The
Government is now planning to heap misery on misery by continuing in this vein
and leave deprived areas even worse off by removing deprivation as a
consideration when allocating funding. It will mean that councils like ours
will once again be left unable to provide some of the services that our
communities rely on.”