“Shocking” amounts of public money are being taken out of local communities in the form of private profit, Green Party Leader Zack Polanski has warned.
Speaking at the LGA annual conference’s first Green Party plenary, he gave examples of road repair contracts that incentivise failure, planning deals where “affordable housing is treated as negotiable, but developer profits are not”, and private care providers extracting more than £250 million pounds in profit.
He warned that “councils in England will still be poorer by the end of this Parliament than they were back in 2010”, and called for five-year funding settlements and grant funding that increases in line with inflation, to keep up with rising costs.
Mr Polanski said the Government has “misguidedly treated local government reorganisation as a cost-efficiency exercise”, when the question should be not its cost, but what kind of local government is needed for the future.
A bold vision and proper funding are crucial if councils are to meet the many challenges their communities face, he added. This includes action on climate change, which should be a statutory duty for local authorities.