Challenges and opportunities for local action
Bristol faces several financial and institutional challenges, that are also shared by other UK local authorities, in its ambition to accelerate local action in pursuit of sustainable development. The city has responded innovatively to these challenges through initiatives such as the One City model, Bristol City Funds and collaborative efforts to improve data sharing and integration.
In an attempt to produce viable and meaningful recommendations for national government that would facilitate better local delivery of the SDGs, we interviewed policy officers from five of the UK’s Core Cities (the UK’s alliance of 11 cities outside London) as well as the Bristol City Council Policy and Public Affairs team. Several common themes emerged, including the piecemeal nature of devolution in the UK, the financial difficulties of maintaining key services while investing in sustainable development, and barriers to monitoring progress. Yet there were also examples of positive change facilitated by partnerships and community action, which became particularly important in the face of the COVID crisis.
- Piecemeal devolution
- An unstable fiscal context
- Data deficits
- The power of partnership coordinators
- Moving forward
Piecemeal devolution
Bristol’s first Voluntary Local Review highlighted the challenge of jurisdictional complexity. It is often the case that the functional urban areas of UK cities do not correspond with local authority boundaries. In Bristol, for example, the City Council local authority area only contains about 70% of the total population of the Bristol Built-Up Area and less than half of the city-region population of 1.1 million. But critical social, economic and environmental challenges do not disappear at the edge of local authority borders. Flows of people, goods, money and pollution cross the council borders daily. The local authorities within the city region are interdependent with one another.
These interdependencies are complicated by the varied political systems within each local area and the role of the regional administration. While the devolution deals that brought about mayoral combined authorities have brought new local powers in adult education, transport and housing, they have been criticised for not going far enough, leaving “a patchwork of institutions which are still at the mercy of central government.”.
There are also complexities brought about by the newly forming Integrated Care Systems (ICS). Across England, these systems are being developed jointly by local authorities and the NHS. While many local authorities consulted for this report appreciate this new approach to meaningful devolution, smaller or less proactive local authorities stand to lose out considerably if they are unable to participate in the consultations being carried out as these regional healthcare bodies form. In the case of Bristol, the local authority is one of three in a single system.
The Bristol Health and Wellbeing Board acts as an effective bridge between local authorities and the ICS, whereas the formation of the Kent and Medway ICS demands the engagement of 26 borough councils. Conversely, Cornwall County Council has just one council and one ICS, making it far easier for the local government to align its priorities with the ICS as it develops.
This contrast between different systems will make it harder for some local authorities to focus on tackling issues of health and, consequently, the SDG agenda. Engaging meaningfully with the ICS formation process requires capacity within local authorities, which has become more difficult to resource post-COVID in the face of significant financial pressures, exacerbated by COVID and the requirement workforce pressures.
In sum, devolution has been piecemeal, undermining coherent and ambitious local and regional action. These challenges have been significantly compounded by fiscal constraints.
An unstable fiscal context
Finance is a critical barrier to accelerated local action. Since the introduction of a programme of austerity beginning in 2009, local authorities have been in a persistent state of fiscal triage. The Ministry of Housing, Communities & Local Government (now known as the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities) estimates that national funding for local authorities fell by 49.1% in real terms between 2011 and 2018. As the austerity programme was spatially blind to the varying socio-economic conditions of each local authority, its effects have been experienced unevenly. Cities in the North were particularly affected by the cuts, with Newcastle City Council currently facing a £94 million spending gap in addition to the £305 million reduction in their budget since 2010.
The cuts have resulted in significant restructuring of budgets and strategies as local authorities seek new ways of addressing important issues with increasingly limited resources. Immediate social and economic issues are prioritised over longer-range challenges, including sustainable development. Funding cuts and the lack of large-scale regeneration financing which existed pre-2011 in some cities interviewed, have led to programmes such as statutory sustainable development plans being dropped in order to prioritise critical services.
Due to the burden placed on the NHS and the cost of the Treasury’s furlough scheme, the COVID pandemic exacerbated these challenges, forcing further restructuring of city council priorities and budgets, including the suspension of services deemed nonessential. Representatives of the Core Cities reinforce this point, stating that during the initial stages of the pandemic, everything considered business as usual was put on hold. As such, cities’ visions for sustainable development were temporarily side lined. Increased funding for local government will be essential to accelerate sustainable development.
However, limited funding is not the only fiscal challenge. Our research revealed widespread frustration with the way critical resources – particularly for investment – are allocated through competitive, time-bound and ringfenced funding mechanisms.
Councils are required to bid for funding from Westminster or negotiate a deal to address critical local priorities, which one policy officer deemed a “waste of time and resources,” especially for unsuccessful bids and negotiations The increasing reliance on “bidding and deal-making rather than capacity building” for local government in the UK undermines the strategic planning that sustainable local development demands.
For example, in 2017, Bristol was awarded funding from Feeding Britain for Feeding Bristol, a pilot to tackle food poverty in the city. However, the city was unsuccessful in its follow-up bid and the project paused. Eventually new funding was secured, but the fundraising activity itself diverted valuable resource from getting on with the work.
This model of competitive funding also means that successful pots of funding for one local authority come at the detriment of others, exacerbating regional inequalities. Under-resourced authorities grappling with protracted austerity have simply been unable to access certain funding opportunities due to capacity constraints (ibid).
Such inequalities are compounded by universal reductions in grant funding. Consequently, many of the most deprived local authorities, which relied more heavily on grant funding, faced greater reductions, resulting in local authority budgetary changes ranging from –1.6% to –46% (Gray and Bradford, 2018).
Funding mechanisms are also often ringfenced for particular types of investment, or service improvements dictated by central government, rather than driven by locally defined priorities. For example, the recent Household Support Fund ringfenced spending percentages such that a proportion of the funding had to spent on pensioners. While not an issue in itself, the funding allocations created complexity. By ringfencing the funds to be spent on pensioners receiving Pension Credit, the local demographics were not considered. In Greater Bristol, falling within the administrative boundary of the West of England Combined Authority, fewer pensioners claim Pension Credit than in many surrounding local authorities. As a result, Bristol’s pensioners received disproportionately more funding per person than pensioners in surrounding local areas. It also meant that other vulnerable groups in Bristol received a lower level of support than they would have if the local authority had been able to choose how the finance was spent.
The need for further devolution and increasing council capacity to raise finances independently of Westminster were repeated themes when speaking to council policy leads. Representatives from the Core Cities also stressed the importance of building private-public partnerships. In Glasgow, the SDGs were seen as a key hook for engaging businesses in positive social and environmental action – a message that resonates with Bristol’s experience. Similarly, Newcastle shared its commitment to increasing stakeholder engagement, while Belfast is also investigating the opportunities presented by public-private partnerships to deliver its SDG-related ambitions.
Giving local authorities greater autonomy over how regional finance is spent and providing longer-term, less competitive sources of funding would allow local authorities to better target their work to support the most vulnerable. It would also allow for better recognition of the specific challenges of each local authority and improve equity of funding for areas across the UK that face the greatest deprivation.
Data deficits
Access to the data required to report on the SDGs remains problematic. Local authorities in the UK are fortunate to have support from the Office for National Statistics (ONS), but not all relevant data is held by the ONS. Some government departments do not share data or do not geographically disaggregate data to the level required for local monitoring. A lack of disaggregated data, or a lack of access to data, can make targeted interventions by local authorities difficult to justify, deliver and monitor. This is particularly true for issues around biodiversity where a lack of concrete data for most local authorities and a lack of resourcing to record new data makes it difficult to target action.
Disaggregated data allows local authorities to compare regional and national contexts and therefore identify issues that may need prioritisation. With funding so tightly controlled, this is particularly important to justify any resourcing needs. It also allows local authorities to identify and learn from others that have successfully tackled similar challenges.
The importance of timely, locally disaggregated data was made plain by the COVID pandemic. The absence and inaccessibility of data was identified as hindering the initial local and national pandemic response, and ministers have been called on to address ‘structural, legal, and cultural impediments to data-sharing’. Addressing data deficits and mapping local data onto the SDG monitoring framework across UK local authorities could enhance intercity communication, coordination and the monitoring of progress.
The power of partnership coordinators
A key reason Bristol has been able to take more action on the SDGs than most UK local authorities is the development of a coordinator role within the Council, initially funded by the University of Bristol but now institutionalised within the City Office. This role has ensured sustained capacity for cross-sectoral dialogue through regular SDG Alliance meetings and has acted as a stable point of contact for national and international partners engaging with the SDGs. Glasgow and Liverpool, two of the other main UK cities that have taken direct action on the SDGs, have had similar experiences. Glasgow has had an SDG officer funded by URBACT and Liverpool has hosted the Liverpool 2030hub, which has provided a constant external advocacy point of contact.
GIZ, the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit, has taken the resourcing of local action for the global goals a step further, deciding that the best way to ensure sustainable development globally is to make sure that German cities are also developing sustainably. The department funded sustainable development coordinators in cities across the country to coordinate action, strategies and delivery of the SDGs .
This model could easily be replicated across the UK and would provide hubs for national and global partnership activity. Coordinators could also raise awareness about the SDGs, provide information on what it means to take action on the goals, and support greater decentralised effort towards the goals across the UK.
Moving forward
Despite the many challenges local authorities and organisations face in advancing sustainable development locally, there is clear and growing momentum for the adoption of the SDGs. Other UK local authorities, such as Liverpool and Glasgow, have recently incorporated some elements of the UN SDGs into policy.
The COVID crisis has propelled innovation through cross-sectoral collaborations and laid the foundations for long-term change. Belfast City Council described the pandemic as a ‘reset moment’ for the city with hopes that priorities can be reassessed to guarantee a future in which no one is left behind.
A representative from Glasgow City Council highlighted improvements made to active travel infrastructure using COVID-response funding. Over the next three years, Liverpool City Council has pledged £10 million to make the city greener by investing in parks and green spaces, with £3 million set aside for retrofitting public buses to reduce nitrogen dioxide levels and air pollution in congested areas of the city.
In Nottingham, local councillors found that the reduction of mowing during lockdown helped change attitudes to rewilding. Greater numbers of wildflowers and more natural green spaces showed citizens the benefits of protecting biodiversity.
The COVID pandemic also inspired an increase in grassroots and community action. Surges in volunteering schemes demonstrate the power of community in building sustainable urban futures. In Bristol, many communities organised food deliveries, prescription pick-ups and neighbourhood befriending. These groups serve as critical social infrastructure, often filling gaps in local authority and voluntary, community and social enterprise provision. The Community Champions scheme introduced in Newcastle in response to COVID has focused on improving community education on healthcare and mitigating lower vaccine uptake in some demographic groups. The hope underlying schemes such as this is that the momentum generated during the pandemic can produce an inclusive form of sustainable development, centred around ethical, social and environmental principles.
The empowerment of communities, local organisations and city governments is essential to accelerate progress. This can be achieved by devolving more powers, simplifying devolved structures, providing a stable funding environment and facilitating local partnerships. Finally, greater awareness and alignment with the UN’s SDG framework among Core Cities could improve intercity coordination and generate productive dialogue on shared challenges that inspires creative solutions.