Hello and welcome to The Rundown, a podcast from Politics Home.

I'm your host, Alan Tolhurst, and this week we're looking at the crisis in local government finance,

after a number of authorities filed of bankruptcy last year, with dozens more warning about damaging budget shortfalls,

a spiraling cost for social care for other services at risk.

Join me to discuss the government's new financial settlements to town halls.

I'm delighted to be joined by Labour MP Clive Betts, former minister and chair of the Leveling Up Housing and Communities Committee,

along with Pete Marland, leader of Milton Keynes Council and chair of the Economy and Resources

Board at the Local Government Association, along with my colleague here at Polholm, reporter

Kenton Doherty.

So I'm going to start with you, Clive.

I've been wanting to do a podcast for a while on local government finance, and your reports

from your committee that came out last week into this issue was kind of a real kind of a big

moment I think to show sort of how bad things are going and how difficult things are going to be

for town halls in the kind of coming weeks and months and years now can you just explain what your

kind of the recommendations were and the kind of the outcomes of that report that you guys did

what we've highlighted I I think, is an immediate

crisis, local government in general, not just individual councils. That was the important point.

It's just not one or two councils mismanaging their money. It's a problem of not enough money

right across the local government system. An immediate problem, local government association

identified a four billion

pound shortfall in the coming financial year. The IFS said it was going to be seven billion,

so it's around that area. But then a longer term problem that the local government funding

...