Rural Upper-tier Local Authorities

Perran Moon Excerpts

Wednesday 2nd September 2026 Westminster Hall

[Perran Moon (Camborne and Redruth) (Lab)]

Meur ras —it is an honour to serve under your chairship, Mrs Barker. I congratulate the hon. Member for North Shropshire (Helen Morgan) on securing this important debate.

I want to focus on SEND and home-to-school transport. On SEND, Cornwall is the 11th lowest funded of 151 local authorities, receiving less than half the per pupil funding of Kensington and Chelsea. Over the last eight years, the number of our pupils with an EHCP has almost doubled, but the delays in issuing EHCPs are far longer than average. In Cornwall, two thirds of those waiting for an EHCP wait for more than 20 weeks, compared with about 50% in England, meaning more stress and uncertainty for Cornish children and their parents.

In a very large, long and remote coastal region, the additional costs of transport show up persistently in every aspect of Cornish life. Cornwall council’s expenditure on home-to-school transport has increased by nearly 300% over the past seven years—a far steeper rise than for our urban counterparts. When it comes to funding more broadly, being a coastal community with some of the UK’s finest beaches is actually a double-edged sword; in fact, it could be argued that we are damned by our natural beauty. Significant in-migration by wealthy English retirees not only places additional pressures on healthcare and our housing market but masks the true extent of deprivation in Treasury funding models.

In my constituency, the average weekly wages in Camborne, Redruth and Hayle are nearly £100 less than the national average, and child poverty is currently at 35%. We were very thankful that the costs of being remote and coastal were recognised in the local government funding settlement for adult social care, but the cost pressures for home-to-school transport were not reflected. I respectfully say to the Minister that a principle cannot be half applied.

[Helen Morgan]

The hon. Gentleman is making an important and fundamental point: everything costs more when it is spread out. For example, bin collections cost a huge amount more for unitary authorities. Home-to-school transport is not just for children with SEND but for children who cannot catch the bus to school because there is no bus. Everything costs a vastly significant amount more than when people just live down the road. Does the hon. Gentleman agree that it is really important that that is reflected in Government funding formulae, because it is crippling our councils?

[Perran Moon]

I do agree with the hon. Lady. I cannot believe that in the 21st century it is beyond the wit of man or woman to calculate the major costs that affect our rural and remote coastal areas compared with the costs for our urban counterparts. We are not trying to deprive the services available in urban areas; it is about raising the level of services for remote coastal and rural communities to the same standard.

That brings me back to my central point. Despite the rising costs and demands, Cornwall is being asked to do far more with far less, which is why we need a comprehensive, non-mayoral, Cornwall-only devolution deal that allows us to overcome some of the challenges of life in the Duchy.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lewis Cocking]

Lots of difficult decisions had to be made. I politely say to the hon. Gentleman that his party is in government now. We will see the mettle that they are made of in the coming months, when they have to make difficult decisions to produce their Budget, and we will also see how that goes down with the British people outside this place.

Many rural councils face real challenges across the board, and now they are expected to cope with even fewer resources. In my area of Hertfordshire, a semi-rural local authority, the county council is facing a reduction in funding of around £50 million a year. That is thanks to this Labour Government, despite the council already being under extreme pressure from an unfavourable SEND funding formula. Under that formula, Hertfordshire receives one of the lowest funding allocations per head. It would receive millions more if it were funded at the same rate as other areas.

When it comes to SEND, rural authorities lose out. Inner London boroughs receive thousands of pounds more in high needs block funding per pupil. For example, a child in Camden is allocated four times as much as a child in Yorkshire. It should not matter where someone is born in the country; children with special educational needs deserve the same resources. I am sure that all hon. Members from right across this House can agree with that.

Similarly, rural authorities have been ignored throughout this Government’s top-down local government reorganisation. As we have seen in Leicestershire, Nottinghamshire and other areas, rural towns and villages are now being absorbed into new unitary authorities dominated by cities. That will only result in rural areas being more marginalised and left even further behind.

[Perran Moon]

If His Majesty’s Opposition are so unhappy about the local government reorganisation, why is there not a single Opposition Member here to make that point other than him?

[Lewis Cocking]

I thought someone might make that point in this debate. I have been in debates where no Labour or Liberal Democrat MPs have turned up. When I go out and speak to my constituents about how, when they turn on the TV, the Chamber is not full, I explain to them that there are many calls upon Members’ time. I gently say to the hon. Member that some constituents will watch debates that he does not attend and be unhappy with that, so we could maybe think about that before we make interventions on that topic.

As I was saying, this Government’s top-down local government reorganisation has seen rural communities left behind. Rural communities and authorities have also been hugely hit with a high increase in housing targets, forcing them to build over the green belt and ruin the character of their areas. They have increased by up to 487%, while many Labour-run urban areas have seen their targets decrease. The new Prime Minister likes to talk about devolving power to every postcode, but the only changes that people in rural areas have seen are money and power being taken away from them. They are the people that this Labour Government should champion: the hard-working people who have too often been left behind. Instead, they are being sidelined and ignored. The Government need to take time to actually listen to the rural community and protect their way of life.

I may not represent a very rural part of this country, unlike other hon. Members in this room, who have so passionately spoken about their rural areas, but it does not take much to work out that forced local government reorganisation, increases in taxes and reduced funding formulas are the exact opposite of how the Government should support rural local authorities.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government (Jim McMahon)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mrs Barker, and to hear the debate and the passion that Members have for their areas. I quite liked the county competition for the most beautiful part of England, but I am sure that we can agree that England is magnificent coast to coast, and we should all celebrate that.

I will respond to the debate in due course, but I want to start by laying out some of the differences. We are using common language for things that are very different; I think that we are conflating devolution and the powers that will be devolved with the fair funding review and the funding that goes to local authorities. In some cases, there is no clarity on what a regional authority will do to the local authority and community governance, whether that is neighbourhood governance or town and parish councils. In this debate, it has become one and the same. I do not criticise that, and I recognise why that happens. We are all here to represent places and not units of government, so we care about whether our communities are getting the resources needed.

[Perran Moon]

On that specific point, part of the reason why there is a conflation of devolution and the local government funding settlement is that, because our local councils in some areas are so deprived of funding, they have to get funding from something like a visitor levy, which would not typically be allocated for that, in order to supplement the services they need to provide. That is potentially why there is a mix-up of views about devolution and the local government settlement. Does the Minister recognise that point?

[Jim McMahon]

In a sense, I recognise that there will be differences of opinion, depending on which local authority and what part of the country Members represent, about whether the fair funding review fully picks up all the particular circumstances. There might be more agreement on the sufficiency of local government finance. Whatever the allocation across the board, the fair funding review is intended to distribute it in the fairest possible way and in a transparent way, so that Members and councillors can see where the money is going to.

Since coming to power, the Labour Government have delivered long-overdue reforms to council funding through the first multi-year local government settlement in a decade. In doing so, we have delivered transformational changes to how councils are funded, which the public, our local government partners and Parliament have long called for. We have delivered on our commitment to give councils greater certainty and flexibility over their funding, ensuring that resources are fairly aligned to local need and simplifying the funding landscape by ending wasteful competitive bidding, which we all recognise pits one area against another.

The Government also have a very important role to play as an equaliser for local government income. During the course of the debate, I heard references to the amount of grant that individual councils get, and one grant total being compared with another. I want to be clear that the fair funding review is not intended to give every council the same central Government grant. That grant is intended to act as an equaliser for the system, so that in the end all councils have the resources to deliver the public service need in their local areas, while recognising that there are wide differences in England in the local tax bases of council tax and business rates.

As a result of our reforms, nine in 10 councils will receive funding that broadly matches their assessed relative need by the end of the multi-year settlement, up by about a third before the reforms. We recognise the different drivers in demand for services, the cost of providing them in different places and the different abilities of areas to raise council tax. We are therefore making funding available in such a way as to enable all local authorities to provide the same level of services to their residents.

For rural communities, the 2026-27 settlement was a key step in delivering a fairer system to address the issues that matter to local communities across England. It included recognising local circumstances, including differences in the cost of delivering services between rural and urban areas, and using the best available and most up-to-date data, including the latest indices of multiple deprivation to ensure that deprivation in rural areas is captured accurately. I will explain a bit more on that.

I heard references to the fair funding review not taking account of the differential cost of delivering services in rural areas. To be clear, we account for rural costs through the area cost adjustment, which is applied to all formulas. That adjustment captures the variation in wages, property rates, journey times, and a range of other factors that pick up the local variation that takes place. On top of that, we have a remoteness adjustment in social care. I hear representations that say, “Hang on. If it costs more to deliver adult social care in these areas, then surely children’s services and other services such as waste collection and other things ought to be included, too.” The area cost adjustment picks up that general difference of delivering a service in those areas. There is a balance here. We want a simplified system that can be scrutinised and understood. The more we adapt and change and really drill down on that, the more complicated it becomes, the more it has to be updated and the more that changes. There is always a balance to be had between simplicity, being understood and giving certainty over the multi-year settlement, while recognising the differences at a local level.