Resources, Spending, and Party Politics in British Local Government

Abstract

A common basis for reasoning about increasing need for local government support is the high variation of local government resources, measured here by the value of taxable property. The Labour and Conservative parties differ, as do most democratic parties, in their interpretation of how spending should relate to the local resource base. The purpose of the analysis is control for resource base while relating partisan influence on local councils to spending patterns. In fact, the British local government system appears to be relatively impervious to resource differences. Party differences do appear to be affected by resources in boroughs under Conservative control. The larger implication of the study is that the British appear to have devised a local government system where policy, in terms of per capita and total amounts of spending, is unrelated to the partisan structure of politics.