Localisation of social security: what can the advice sector tell us?

a post by Alice Woudhuysen (London Campaign Manager) for the CPAG blog

In the last few years, a slew of reports have been published focusing on the impact of the coalition government’s decision to localise various elements of the national social security system, including council tax benefit (now council tax support) and the discretionary social fund (now local welfare assistance). See CPAG and Zacchaeus 2000 Trust’s report Still Too Poor To Pay on the impact of council tax support on Londoners and Greater Manchester Poverty Action’s study on the collapse of crisis support in England.

In 2011, the government saw localisation as: “…the most effective means of ensuring sufficient local flexibility to secure the planned reduction in expenditure, reflecting local circumstance and priorities...” In other words, it believed that handing decision-making on entitlement to local authorities was the best way of ensuring that limited resources reached those who were most in need. While the government made blunt cuts to budgets, it called upon local authorities to add the nuance to local schemes, in order to protect the most vulnerable.

The reports mentioned above have focused on the effect of localisation on vulnerable people and on local authorities. They have concluded – somewhat depressingly - that localisation has enabled central government to reduce local authority budgets, leading to great financial uncertainty, which in turn has led to local social security provision being cut back and vulnerable people effectively slipping through the net.

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