Council Funding: what's happened and what's next?

This presentation, given at the CIPFA annual Public Finance conference in Birmingham on 10th July 2019, provides a summary of recent IFS analysis of recent trends and the outlook for local government spending. It also includes a discussion of two big issues we need to confront: the level of funding we are willing to provide, which must be consistent with our expectations of service range and quality; and the degree of which the system aims at consistent services across the country ('national solidarity') versus local variation based on revenue-raising capacity and local tax and spending decisions ('local responsibility'). As part of this it discusses options for devolving additional tax powers to local government and the ongoing Fair Funding Review.