Local Government Finance
The question
To ask the Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government, with reference to the policy paper entitled Local Government Finance Report 2025 to 2026: draft, published on 18 December 2024, how much and what proportion of additional funding will be provided to deprived councils.
Answered by Jim McMahon
The final Settlement for 2025-26 makes available over £69 billion for local government, which is a 6.8% cash terms increase in councils’ Core Spending Power on 2024-25.
This included introducing a new ‘Recovery Grant’, worth £600 million, which will go to places where, weighted by population, deprivation outweighs council tax raising ability.
As a result of this and other measures, the most relatively deprived areas of England (the upper decile of the Index of Multiple Deprivation) will receive 23% more per dwelling in available resource through the 2025-26 settlement than the least deprived areas.
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