Westminster Hall — sitting of 2 September 2026: transcript & video

15:27 - 15:34

Speaker 1

Order, order. Helen Morgan to move the motion.

15:34 - 17:47

Speaker 2

Thank you very much, Madam Chair. I'm a vice president of the Local Government Association, and I'm extremely worried about the widening gap between rural and urban areas when it comes to opportunity, social mobility, and economic growth.

Public services that are underfunded and overstretched, lamentably slow digital connectivity, lack of public transport, and urban-centric perceptions which misunderstand the nature of rural life are holding rural areas back, and they are limiting our children's futures. The last local government finance settlement lays bare this neglect in financial terms, and is a stark admission from this government that its plan is to strip funding from rural areas in order to improve services in urban ones. The Rural Services Network has calculated that urban councils will receive 32% more funding per head next year than rural councils. Meanwhile, to plug this gap, rural residents pay on average 17% more council tax per head than urban ones, out of lower than average wages, yet the cost of delivery means they are receiving a poorer public service. For Shropshire Council, the funding situation is particularly grave, following 16 years of catastrophically poor management by Shropshire's Conservatives.

When the Lib Dem administration took over in May 2025, Shropshire was in the most difficult financial position of any council in England. The recently released CIPFA report into the huge challenge faced in Shropshire reveals the details of the Conservatives' poor management: unrealistic budgets and constant overspends that burned through all of the remaining reserves, an obsession with unaffordable vanity projects such as the purchase of Shrewsbury's shopping centers and millions spent on an unaffordable road, a sloppy workforce restructure in 2024-25 which drove out the talented managers needed to transform the financial situation, and the legacy impact of five years of consecutive council tax freezes were all a parting gift left for the new administration to pick up. The report describes the direction of the council under their new, recently appointed chief executive and four-to-five-year improvement plan as a positive step, and a peer review by the LGA praised the significant strides made so far, but the financial position remains perilous and the challenge to restructure the council is a huge one.

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