Cllr Peter Zinkin is Leader of the Conservative Group on Barnet Council.
Imagine running a business where someone else sets your prices, someone else decides what you may build, and the law obliges you to supply whatever your customers need, at whatever it costs. That is now the job of an outer London council. In Barnet, with a Labour Government, a Labour Mayor and a Labour council, it has become close to absurd.
Start with planning. From 31 October a national scheme of delegation takes effect. Regulations abolish the ward councillor’s right to call in an application, and the trigger that sends a contested scheme to committee once enough residents object. Committees are capped at 13 members, and a committee that strays into decisions now reserved for officers risks judicial review. The people residents elect to speak for them on the most visible changes to their streets are being told to stay out of it.
Above that sits the Mayor. His draft London Plan, out for consultation until 15 October, drops the old design-led approach for an “optimisation framework”. This is a London-wide table of recommended heights and densities, set by a site’s setting and transport score. A small-sites design code would apply across the capital, and the Green Belt is opened up through “broad locations for growth”. Whatever Barnet’s own Local Plan says about the character of Mill Hill, Totteridge or Golders Green, the table will count for more. Outer London’s suburbs are not a mistake to be corrected. They are why families chose to live here.
Now the other side of the ledger. While powers drain away, duties pile up. Adult social care, children’s services, special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) and, above all, temporary accommodation are statutory. They are driven by demand and largely beyond any council’s control. Only about £18 million of Barnet’s £544 million budget is genuinely discretionary. The council found £74 million of savings over three years and still faced a £79.3 million gap this year. It has needed Exceptional Financial Support (EFS) two years running, with £55.7 million approved last year and £79.6 million this year. The Government made that support conditional on an external review by CIPFA. The review describes a highly fragile position and warns that the council may need external support to become sustainable.
EFS is not a grant. It is permission to borrow to pay day-to-day running costs, and the cost compounds. The council’s own strategy shows the annual cost of servicing that borrowing reaching about £40 million by 2029/30 and £62.75 million a year by 2030/31. Every pound spent on interest is a pound not spent on services.
Then comes the most perverse part. The new funding formula assumes every council charges a notional Band D of £2,060. Barnet charges £438 less, but grant is calculated as if the difference were being collected. The council cannot collect it, because rises above the limit need the Secretary of State’s consent or a referendum. Ministers are not expected to decide until late this year or early next.
Even so, the council’s new recovery plan rests most of its identified savings on a modelled rise worth about £70 million a year, which nobody has approved. The plan counts that money in full from next April. The council’s own financial strategy, published on the same agenda, includes none of it and assumes more EFS instead. CIPFA has told Barnet to review its low Council Tax, and the Labour Cabinet Member for Financial Sustainability says the council already assumes close to 5 per cent next year. Yet even the £70 million covers barely a third of a £200 million gap.
Conservatives in Barnet kept bills low for years, and residents benefited. Under Labour, the system now punishes that restraint while forbidding the remedy. A formula that treats low tax as unused capacity, but will not let a council use it, is not a funding settlement. It is a trap.
So what is left? A council that cannot set its own tax, cannot decide its own planning applications, cannot shape its own suburbs and cannot control its biggest costs. Yet it will be blamed, and faces the threat of intervention, if the books do not balance.
The answers are not complicated. If ministers want the notional Band D to drive grant, they must give councils a clear and timely route to reach it, with protection for low-income households. That decision cannot be left until weeks before budgets are set. If ministers want councils to carry the cost of homelessness and SEND, they must fund it or reform the duties. And if they want housing growth in outer London, they should trust the elected councillors who know these streets. A London-wide table and a scheme of delegation drafted in Whitehall are no substitute.
Conservative councils have always accepted that local government must live within its means. It is entitled to ask for the means, and the powers, to do so. At present it has neither.
Barnet needs clear policies from the Conservative Party to start to take it out of this madness, towards a world in which locally elected members can once again run their councils to reflect the needs and concerns of their own residents.