Backing Cornwall Council's fair funding campaign

My article in this coming week’s Cornish Guardian is backing the unitary authority’s new campaign for fair funding. It will be as follows:

The unitary authority has launched its latest “fair funding” campaign with the publication of a handful of startling statistics. It has, for example, compared Cornwall with Camden and concluded that, if we had the same level of funding as the London borough, “we would have £212 million more each year for public services.”

The Council has also pointed out that “Kensington and Chelsea delivers the same range of services as Cornwall but has 48% more funding, per resident, to do this with.”

It is the case that the UK Government has slashed funding to local authorities, forcing them to increase council tax significantly in an impossible attempt to fill the void, which is adversely impacting on many people already struggling to pay their day-to-day bills.

This is therefore an important campaign and the leader of Cornwall Council is asking residents to sign a “Stand Up for Cornwall” pledge, which can be found at: www.cornwall.gov.uk. I fully support this initiative, and hope you will as well.

Campaigning for fair funding for Cornwall is not new, but the need for this latest effort shows that the Westminster parliament has not been listening.

In preparing this week’s article, I have looked back at many, many examples of inequitable funding across the UK and how it affects Cornwall. Here are just a few:

- 2013: A report “Rebalancing Our Cultural Capital” noted that, in 2012-2013, Arts Council England distributed a total of £320m of taxpayers' money. London received £20 per head of population, compared to £3.60 per person elsewhere. DCMS meanwhile distributed £450m of public funding to “major national cultural institutions.” London received £49 per head compared to just £1 per person on average elsewhere.

- 2014: Research from LG Futures (Costs of Providing Services in Rural Areas) demonstrated that the “cost of providing services in a rural area is greater than in an urban area” – but the government funding formulae failed to reflect this in its calculations.

- 2015: Reports showed that the residents of Cornwall and Devon receive “less government funding than other police areas,” and paid “39% of the local policing bill through council tax.” The comparable figure is so much lower elsewhere, for example, in Merseyside (17%), Greater Manchester (22%) and London (27%).

- 2016: In the debate lead by members of the Rural Fair Share Group, Conservative MPs lined up to criticise the “extraordinarily unfair” funding arrangements with one arguing that, in the future, local government would be neither “sustainable nor deliverable.”

It is clear that we must continue to put great pressure on the United Kingdom’s Conservative Government – including six MPs from Cornwall – which has the collective ability and power to deliver fair funding.