I am delighted that the Government has responded to my calls for more funding for North Yorkshire by allocating an extra £19 million for 2019-20 to help pay for local government services. My colleagues and I debated the Local Government Finance Report in Parliament last week and I have also met with Ministers to help them recognise the challenges that local authorities in Thirsk and Malton face. I have been fighting for more money for local services since I became Thirsk and Malton’s MP four years ago. The Government is working to better the system for the future and I shall continue my fight for fairer funding for my constituents.
A key element in improving services delivered by local government is the need for a fairer funding formula. The present situation is unfair and local government needs a long-term sustainable solution. As ever in public spending, nine out of the ten best funded authorities per capita per year are in London. In North Yorkshire, we contribute more but get less in services compared to people living in Inner London boroughs and wards. Central Government grants to local authorities to Inner London councils are £437 per person per year, for metropolitan boroughs they are £319, for unitaries they are £225 and for counties £153.
My neighbouring MP, Rishi Sunak is the Under-Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government. He, his colleagues and their officials at the Department have looked at this issue and are working to simplify the system. I took the opportunity to speak in the House of Commons in the Local Government Finance debate to urge the Government to move to a fairer funding settlement.
We also need to deal with some of the underlying pressures for local authorities, particularly the time bomb that is adult social care. An extra £10 billion of funding for adult social care up to 2020, including £650 million committed by the 2018 Budget, will go a long way to help in the short term. In the longer term, we need the fairer funding formula underpinned by the business rates retention pilots. I am delighted that North Yorkshire County Council has been entrusted with one of those pilots. The pilot will mean that NYCC can retain 75 per cent of business rate growth with half of this going towards fostering regional and economic growth.
Adult social care is putting more pressure on my constituency than any other issue and we need to take a more strategic approach to its funding. I sit on the Select Committee on Housing, Communities and Local Government and we worked with the Health and Social Care Committee to produce a joint report, which came up with a simple recommendation. We should emulate the German system of social insurance, which involves a social care premium. It is a simple, scalable and sustainable solution: everybody pays a small amount so that nobody has to pay everything. It has been incredibly successful since it was introduced in Germany in the mid-1990s to replace a system of local government funding. The Department of Health and Social Care are committed to getting adult social care right and my friend and colleague Rishi Sunak agrees that they should consider the work of our report.
