council tax

Raising Council Tax won’t fix local government

This article originally appeared in Tribune.

A decade of austerity has decimated local authority funding and left many councils in crisis – but hiking regressive Council Tax isn’t a real solution. Ahead of the today’s budget statement, CLES’s Rachel Bentley and Victoria Bettany have written for Tribune explaining why.

This week’s Budget will be make or break for councils across the UK. It’s set to be a true test of whether the government really cares about the poorest in our society, or whether it’s content to continue passing off responsibility entirely to local authorities, whose capacity to help has been diminished by a decade of austerity.