Note again that there is a constitutional problem here. It isn’t surprising that ministers like a formula that disfavours inner city areas with deep needs when none of them represent such areas and the Tory party has no prospect of winning seats in such areas.
https://twitter.com/GeorgePeretzQC/status/1370128165641854983
Governments that speak for, and have at the front of their minds, only certain areas of the country they serve is a real problem with first past the post.
Second problem: control of too much from the centre. If local government raised far more of its own money, with redistribution between them determined by a generally agreed formula, the centre wouldn’t be in a position to distribute favours in this way.
And towns/counties/boroughs would have budgets that they could use to promote their own development in the way that seemed best to them.
But our constitutional arrangements offer no protection to local government at all, and expose it to constant meddling and power-grabbing from the centre. Most spectacularly, they allowed successive Tory governments to concentrate austerity on local government spending.
One good idea to deal with these problems is the replacement of the HoL by a “UK Bundesrat”: a part of the legislature that represented devolved and local governments, and would resist Westminster’s tendency to centralise (and be all over issues such as funding methodologies).
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