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Burnham's 'devolved tax & spend' - what does it mean?

Monday, August 3, 2026 10:43

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Being cynical, what it probably means is – more vague feelgood stuff. But assuming the ‘details’ we’ve been given are the bare bones of what’s being proposed, it looks like:

Local authorities will get to keep more of, and spend, ‘taxes raised locally’
LAs will be able to borrow more
But somehow this won’t just make a handful of high tax-base areas disproportionately better off, nor leave low tax-base areas stranded

Have I got that wrong?

If not, then … how is that any different? Or at least, different enough to merit gushing stuff like “the biggest shift of power out of Whitehall and Westminster” (Burnham) or “phenomenal, it really is a sea change, it’s monumental” (Mayor of West Midlands)? Right now, central government comes up with some kind of “needs-based” assessment and distributes grants etc accordingly from those ‘taxes raised locally’, acting as a kind of equaliser. Won’t we end up at the same place, albeit after perhaps a couple of years of chaos and unexpected consequences?

Does it mean that, whereas today if Barchester wants the A99 to bypass the town centre, it has to lobby Westminster for tax-payers’ money to build one, tomorrow they’ll just have to pay for it themselves because nobody else is going to anymore – so maybe they’ll just decide they don’t want one after all?

Burnham swiftly ruled out Houchen’s smart, cheeky riposte of saying that with his new share of the income tax pie he’ll give everyone on Teesside an income tax rebate!

As for borrowing more … FFS, how many more Birmingham / Northampton / Croydon / Thurrock bankruptcies does Burnham want? In 2011 the cretinous Osborne took off the very prudent constraints on what speculative ‘commercial’ dealings LA’s were previously allowed to get into, and that hasn’t ended well at all. And we haven’t even mentioned the increasingly dire incompetence and corruption of whole swathes of local government, both elected members and employees. I mentioned Houchen somewhat favourably above, but in most other respects, his Teesside fiefdom is a poster-child for outrageous local cronyism, rentierism and all-round hanky-panky – see every issue of Private Eye.

Please tell me if I’ve got the wrong end of the stick!

Source: http://www.cityunslicker.co.uk/2026/08/burnhams-devolved-tax-spend-what-does.html

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