County leaders ‘protest too much’ over government cuts to Herefordshire

Cuts in the money Herefordshire gets from the government are “not sustainable”, a senior Conservative councillor has said.

A week before Christmas the county heard it would lose nearly all of the £7-million Rural Services Delivery Grant (RSDG). Despite increases in other grants, total funding from central government has been cut by around £2.5million for the financial year from April.

“The government is now only giving us 16 per cent of our revenue, which is probably the lowest it’s ever been,” cabinet member for transport Coun Phillip Price said.

“The Labour government must hate rural life,” Mr Price, himself a farmer, added.

“We are being screwed to the ground. There has to be an agenda coming forward that we are unaware of.”

Cabinet member for finance Coun Pete Stoddart agreed that compared to the council’s 84 per cent of revenue from council tax and business rates, the central government contribution was “very low”.

He added that the council had been planning to increase council tax in the county by 3.99 per cent for the year ahead, until the government’s announcement “blew that out the window” – obliging it to now bring in the full 4.99 per cent increase.

“We have just as much deprivation in rural areas as in urban,” he added. “How is that equitable?”

For the Liberal Democrats, Coun Kevin Tillett said he thought the Conservatives “doth protest too much”, given that “cutting funding to Herefordshire Council did not start last July”.

“Year after the funding under the last government was repeatedly and drastically slashed,” leaving local council tax payers to fill the gap, he said, while the extra costs of a sparse rural population “has never been reflected in our funding”.

And Green group leader Coun Diana Toynbee said the loss of the RSDG “pales into insignificance compared to the years of austerity we had in Herefordshire under the Conservatives”.

Independents for Herefordshire leader Coun Liz Harvey pointed out that much of the remaining sources of government funding for the county “has stood still, and/or is ring-fenced”.

Council leader Coun Jonathan Lester acknowledged that the revenue support grant from the previous government had fallen from £64 million when he joined the council in 2011, to £600,000 in 2019.

But he said the RSDG “was an acknowledgement by the previous government of rural councils’ extra challenges”.