Is anyone worried about their council going bust?

[PassingStranger]

It was on the news this morning that alot of councils are very close to going bust.
Services are having to be cut again and council tax going up?

What would happen if your council went bust?
Is there a way to find out how your council is doing?
Anyone worried like me? Xx

There is a lot of waste, a lot of time wasting, it’s hard/almost impossible to get rid of useless lazy people, everything takes ages.

I have a horrible feeling that’s the case for every single council in the UK.

@Kimchie over 55s are very hard to make redundant as it’s so expensive as well (assuming they have long service)! I have a friend who is desperate to go but has twice been told between redundancy and pension it’s too costly to agree it.

It’s already happening here!

I am a little concerned as both our local city and county councils are on the verge of bankrupcy. I work for a charity and these councils seem to have cut all their provision for helping vulnerable people and told them all to come to our charity for help. For example - an elderly person needs to make a claim for housing benefit or a blue badge and can't do it online, they ask the council for help and they won't even send them a paper form and just signpost to our charity to help. We are struggling to survive, have 3 advisors for the whole city and county and are completely overwhelmed. At one time the local authorities would be dishing out funding to charities to take on the work, now we are expected to do it for nothing. I worry about vulnerable people, our waiting lists are now 3 weeks for an initial phone call back and if a benefit can't be backdated then they just miss out on money.

100% agree with everything you've said here.

Oh it is. And government agencies - I worked for one and it would take 15 people people to do the job of one person. Infuriating wastes of time all over the place.

If they go bust, what happens to business rates debt? Asking for a friend 😜

In general yes it's the case that capital receipts can only be spent on other capital items. But the council can ask DLUHC for a 'capitalisation direction' which would allow them to spend it on revenue costs (ie running costs). You should e quite if they've asked about this - it's often the first thing DLUHc offer when a council is facing financial issues.

I would assume they’d double down on recovering any and all debts to plug gaps in the budget.

I'm not sure that's right. Council tax has been making up an increasing proportion of core spending power over the last few years.

The class of local authorities I engage with on average get 60% of their income from council tax and some of them it's nearly topping 70% of income from council tax.

Even policing which traditionally received proportionally less funding from council tax than other classes of authorities gets 33% of their funding by raising council tax.

Wrt the SEN transportation, parents who are able to can transport their children, and my council pays 45p per mile. However, the parent has to transport for an entire term in advance, then apply for the funding, get the school to fill out forms to verify attendance and wait up to 28 days for funding to be paid.
For some parents, they cannot afford to wait this long, so while I agree that checks need to be made, the long wait times mean its not viable for many parents to transport their children, even if they have access to a vehicle and the time to do it. Those children will be provided with a taxi at an eye-watering cost. I wonder if the taxi firm have to wait months to be paid?
Once my council have agreed on a start date for SEN transport via taxi, usually the first date of the term, they have one month to put a taxi outside your door. It quite often takes a month to physically see a taxi outside your door, so parents either have to keep their children home or take them themselves. If the parent transports during this time, there are no funds available to help the parent with this cost, because the council have agreed on paper to provide a taxi. Apparently its completely irrelevant that the taxi isn't physically there!
Policies such as these don't foster any trust between parents and the council so parents are even more reluctant to help out, which is a shame because a journey of just 5 miles for example can cost the council upwards of £400 a week as opposed to £22.50 a week if the parent does it.
It makes financial sense to make it easier for the parent to transport, not the taxi firms, but many SEN parents can't cope with an added round of pressure and council policy.
Another issue is that the taxi firm will only be paid if they drop the child off at their home address. This doesn't work for working parents whose children use childcare.

We have council tax rises AND my dm is having to sell her house to pay for a care home.
I know it's a shares pot but feel we're contributing a lot for less in return.

Social care for the elderly is means tested isn't it? Threshold is £23k in savings and if there's someone living in the home so it can't be sold yet. Anyone with more will pay.

Dm had carers x4 per day and all had to be paid by her.

DontBeAPrickDarren · Yesterday 23:03

@Kimchie over 55s are very hard to make redundant as it’s so expensive as well (assuming they have long service)! I have a friend who is desperate to go but has twice been told between redundancy and pension it’s too costly to agree it.

Of course, offering voluntary redundancy must cost a fortune when you have to pay out massive packages.
I’d take a guess about 25% of the people I work with day to day have over 15 years service, some are nearing 30 years.
Most of them are major assets, loads of experience, passionate, bloody good at their jobs, a wealth of knowledge that I couldn’t have learned how to do my job without, a couple who retired recently who are very missed.
Others are just hanging on way past time and it’s draining time and money out of the service and also blocking new blood coming in which is desperately needed.
It’s against rules to even hint at retirement to these people.
No signs of redundancies yet, we are still recruiting but only short contracts which then get renewed periodically which makes sense.
Im guessing if/when redundancies are necessary it will be voluntary to start with?
I hope so, imagine some could afford to take vol redundancy as early retirement and be happy to go.

I’m tired of councils mismanaging the money they do have - sometimes it’s hard to tell that they are on tight budgets. It’s ridiculous when you find out what they prioritise and invest in. No wonder they are going bust. I’ve worked on a few council projects and a common theme is appointing the wrong people and contractors. Putting so much money into new shiny ideas nobody asked for or really needed instead of bettering existing services. And it just seems like the decision makers (in some councils) are out of touch with the daily needs of people. Many are also at the mercy of developers and other private organisations which screws up their perception/influences choices.

It’s worrying. I’m in London and as we have so many boroughs it’s interesting to see how differently each work and which are for their people and those that just don’t care.

Our council is one of the lowest funded in the country so they pretty much already cut all the non statutory services over the past 13 years, our council run libraries went years ago although we do still have physical libraries they are now run by volunteer groups and are often attached to something like a village or community hall which can generate funds by being rented out for parties etc.

Where our council seems to go wrong is thst they don’t seem to take into account the knock on effects, either in a different council department or in a few years down the line.

So school transport has been mentioned as a problem. School transport is expensive as kids end up in special schools miles from home as they’ve been shoe horned in as it’s the only place suitable and available. Yet these same children a few years before were perhaps in mainstream and the la said they were ok in mainstream without any support/didn’t need an ehcp as it’s all about cost cutting in that area too. Had that child had. 1-1 ta for at least some of the time early on then they may have been ok in mainstream and never needed to go to a specialist independent school costing £80k a year in fees plus transport at prob another £50k a year. Instead by the time an ehcp and 1-1 is given in mainstream things have deteriorated to such a level and child has got into a negative cycle with school thst it’s too little too late. Also transport in our la is a diff department and no consideration is made when deciding on school placement so only the cost of the placement comes into it so a child could end up at a cheaper school miles away costing more in transport than it would to go to a more expensive specialist on doorstep

There are two periods when dc are the most expensive, the nursery years when full time childcare is needed and the uni years (when many parents are around 50).

Plus everyone pays towards all social care evenly through their working lives.

I don’t think anyone would notice if our council went bust. They’re utterly useless. The council tax is eyewatering, I don’t know of a single property, even flats, that are below Band D. We just about get the bins emptied if we’re lucky.

They’re one with a very high amount of debt already so it’s a distinct possibility that they will collapse in the next year or so.

Our council spent £300k on refurbishing our tiny village library with mood lighting, an outside decking area that no one ever used, new racking, etc., nothing on the fabric of the building like new roof, replacement windows, etc. Heaven knows how they spent so much as it seemed to be all internal fixtures and fittings (for a small one room library with a small toilet/kitchen area), but it was closed for nearly six months whilst they did it and there was always lots of vans parked outside and lots of workers stood around doing nothing.

Within a year of it re-opening, they closed it down and ripped everything out into a few huge skips!

Then a couple of years later, they re-opened it again, again spending months on refitting it with, yes, you've guessed it, new mood lighting, a new decking area, new shelving, new equipment, etc.

So please don't anyone try to persuade me that councils don't waste money!! They seem to be full of incompetents who havn't a clue what they're doing. Either they're incompetent or they're corrupt!

Yep, mismanagement of funds is a real problem. Our council had a cunning plan to buy lots of High Street commercial property, just as the market turned, so now are the proud owners of several random empty/derelict high street shops, such as the old Wilkos, Argos, etc. Not only are they not getting any rental income from them, they suffered massive bad debts when firms went bankrupt - i.e. Wilkos owed them over a hundred thousand in unpaid rent which will have to be written off!!

They also own a derelict drive through Burger King and a derelict theme park site that closed down 20 years ago, having bought them years after they were first put on the market as no one else wanted to buy them.

Perhaps they should have realised that professional landlords/property developers weren't wanting to buy High Street shops and derelict sites for a reason!!!

And don’t even start on the amount councils spend on management consultants who have no clue of the service to tell them how to save money…

Came on to say this

Paying for green bins ( yes I know other councils already do)
Pot holes
Shops closing
Bus routes
Sen provision
Council tax up 4.99%
The posh people up in arms that they now may have to pay to park in their footballers village.
And our lovely council £18.3 mill in the red gave £30k left in the pot to another council instead of a quick spend
And wastes thousands on unnecessary court action
Don't get me started on the state of children and adult services

Our council have a number of white elephant properties but instead of just selling them to anyone interested they have to vet them make prospective buyers jump through hoops theyve dreamt up. Put strange covenants on them. It can take years, buyer then backs out in despair.

Birmingham finally did auction off properties last month I hope others follow.

We had a school that closed council decided to work with a builder to turn them into apartments and houses on the playground. The builders charged them millions when they'd been given the building and land for free. This was the builders first big job he'd previously been a brickie. He went bump on his first big project in the cold commercial world.

@ColinRobinsonsFart have you seen the state of the new car park in Crewe?
Leaning tower of pisa is straighter.
The floors dip in the middle and green stuff has been planted on it.

Housing in our area. Daughter in law 3 kids in a 2 bed HA
Her neighbour in a 3 bed pays just £3 extra a month on their rent.

Her eldest is a lad 13 sharing a room with 11 yr sister and 7yr brother.

"Either they're incompetent or they're corrupt!"

For my particular council they've been found guilty of both.