Question to the Department for Levelling Up, Housing & Communities:

To ask the Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, what assessment he has made of the impact of the reduction of local government financial support over the last 10 years on the provision of services and facilities by Wirral Council.

The provisional Local Government Finance Settlement for 2022-23 makes available an additional £3.5 billion to councils, including funding for adult social care reform. This is an increase in local authority funding for 2022-23 of over 4% in real terms, which will ensure councils across the country have the resources they need to deliver key services.

In total, we expect Core Spending Power to rise from £50.4 billion in 2021-22 to up to £53.9 billion in 2022-23.

The Government is providing around £1.6 billion additional grant in 2022-23. This includes additional funding for Supporting Families and Cyber Resilience, which will be distributed outside of this Settlement.

We are allocating most of that funding through the provisional Settlement, including through a one-off 2022-23 Services Grant, which gives local authorities an additional £822 million of funding for all services.

Local authorities can also make use of over £1 billion of additional resource specifically for social care in 2022-23

For Wirral Council, this represents an increase in cash terms of up to 7.4% compared to last year, worth £21.8 million. This is above the average cash increase across England of 6.9%.