January 2025
Featured in this insight: Financial services, Local & regional government
Council leaders see finance and budgeting as one of the greatest challenges for their council over the next 12 months. A survey conducted by the Local Government Association (LGA) has found that most English council leaders believe finance and budgeting is the greatest challenge for their council over the coming year, with 72% of the 70 council leaders surveyed revealing it will be a big challenge in 2025.
The LGA surveyed 70 English council leaders to find out how the local government leaders felt throughout 2024 and what their thoughts are for 2025. Leaders revealed their councils’ upcoming challenges and their future aspirations - wishing for sustainable funding, certainty, and more freedom from Keir Starmer’s government.
Other findings revealed that big challenges included demand pressures on services (48%) and organisational or service transformation (30%). Finance and demand challenges were more of a problem for leaders of unitary, London or metropolitan borough councils – 90% said budgeting is the biggest challenge, with over 75% saying the same for demand pressures.
Additionally, over 80% of the leaders surveyed believe the share of the service costs that will fall on local residents and service users through fees and charges will rise over the next year (only 1% believed there would be a decrease). Again, the score was higher for the leaders of unitary, London and metropolitan councils.
In terms of achieving future goals, leaders expressed the highest levels of confidence in their readiness and ability to improve community engagement (84%) and build strong local politics (83%) Over half of those surveyed also felt their council had what it takes to build more houses (58%) and act on climate change (54%) in the next 12 months. In contrast, council leaders felt least optimistic about the likelihood of reducing homelessness (28%) and improving health and care services (26%) in the year ahead.
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