Brexit
Business
Cities
Constitutional Affairs
Crime & Justice
Digital
Economics
Education
Employment
Environment
Energy Policy
Financial Policy
Foreign Policy
Government
Health
Housing
Industrial Strategy
Infrastructure
International Development
International Relations
Local Government
Migration
Politics
Public Sector
Regulation
Security & Defence
Social Policy
Society & Diversity
Taxation
Technology
Trade
Welfare
July 16, 2020
This latest report from UK think tank Localis looks at fiscal decentralisation to properly fund local services and infrastructure.
From the crises in elderly care and youth crime to the desperate challenge of building enough homes across the country, the need to properly fund, so as to properly deliver valued local services and infrastructure has never been clearer to the public. In this environment, the case for giving our local authorities greater powers to raise revenues to fund vital place-based public services and infrastructure investment is seemingly unanswerable. Barely a week passes without a new well-evidenced piece of research decrying the overcentralized nature of local spending and national revenue collection. The arguments have been made. The incontrovertible evidence for granting fiscal freedom keeps stacking up in ever taller piles of reportage, and everyone seemingly agrees with the argument. Up and down the country, people want to see the vulnerable looked after in local settings, pillars of community life, like the library maintained and new roads and homes built to support growth for future prosperity.
Fiscal devolution: adopting international approaches is a comparative study of the Netherlands, Germany and Switzerland, aimed at showing how fiscal decentralisation is practiced by our near continental neighbours. The report looks at European local authorities, both metropolitan and non-metropolitan, explaining how they manage fiscal devolution and how their tax bases fit within the wider context for decentralisation at regional and national level. By exploring the experiences of colleagues abroad, we hope to demonstrate different ways that tax-and-spend might function within the context of English local government finance to bolster the local state’s rather sparse fiscal armoury.
Read Full ReportBy George Dibb; Carsten Jung; Henry Parkes; Shreya Nanda
Why the UK should seize the opportunity to support a global minimum corporation tax
Read moreBy Professor Paul Cheshire; Professor Christian Hilber
Options for reforming residential property taxes in England
Read moreBy Dr Gemma Tetlow; Aron Cheung
Read more