This page provides details on both funding and spending of local authorities in England.

The main total we present here is “core spending power”, a government estimate of the amount of money that local authorities have available to take decisions. This includes settlement funding (made up of Revenue Support Grant and retained business rates revenue), various other grants, and an estimate of the council tax that authorities could raise. It does not include grants that are passed straight through to recipients, such as the Dedicated Schools Grant.

Use the dropdown menu below to select the local authority you’re interested in and view key statistics.

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If you would like to access this information in an alternative format please email papers@parliament.uk and we will review your request.

Notes

Several local authorities were restructured at various points over the time period covered by this dashboard, which can leave gaps in their funding and spending figures. Both the original councils and those that replaced them are included in this dashboard. Blank cells in tables indicate years when the authority in question did not exist.

On the “Funding settlements” page, figures for “settlement funding” represent the Settlement Funding Assessment total provided through the local government funding settlement, plus compensation for under-indexation of the business rates multiplier. Settlement funding on the “Long-term comparisons” page does not include this compensation.

Funding figures from before 2015/16 are not directly comparable in monetary terms on a consistent basis, because local government responsibilities and funding changed regularly before this point. Data going back to 2010/11 can be downloaded here; the National Audit Office (NAO) has also produced a data visualisation going back this far that may be helpful. The “Long-term comparisons” page uses methodology similar to the NAO to produce percentage figures.

The spending figures given here are “net current expenditure”, which covers each local authority’s total spending financed through central government grants, council tax, business rates, and so on, less additional income from sales, fees, charges, and other sources. This does not include capital spending – that is, spending on assets that last, such as buildings or vehicles. The spending figures are much higher than those for spending power, as the latter does not include some ring-fenced grants.

Because the spending figures are net of income from sales, fees and charges, spending on particular services can sometimes be negative.

Spending figures can also appear to change significantly over time when the responsibilities of local authorities change – for example, when schools become academies they are no longer funded by the local authority.

Real-terms figures have been calculated using a smoothed GDP deflator in 2020/21, giving the same average annual growth in the deflator in each year between 2019/20 and 2021/22, to remove the distortions caused by pandemic-related factors.

All figures here are for local authorities in England – different local government structures exist in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, so the figures are not comparable. The best information on local authorities from the devolved administrations is available from their respective websites: Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland.

Data updates

We aim to update aspects of this dashboard once a year, in line with data releases from the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, but the data shown here may not be the latest available. MPs and their staff can contact the Commons Library with queries about updates.

Sources

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