Nottingham City Council has produced damning ‘heat maps’ suggesting the city is missing out on tens of millions of pounds of Government money while councils in richer southern areas benefit.
The Transition Funding Grant scheme was introduced by the Government in 2016 to soften the blow of budget cuts for councils over two years.
Maps published by Nottingham City Council, which has been campaigning against the system, illustrate the funds were mainly handed out to more affluent councils in the south while places like Nottingham received no additional money.
The council said the project now had a ‘whiff of scandal’ and called on the Government to release more information about how it designed the system.
The Government insists Nottingham has enough money to meet demand for services.
It comes as a National Audit Office investigation into the scheme found the level of need or demand for local services was not considered in the design of the grant.
Surrey County Council got £24 million through the scheme, despite seeing cuts of £16 per household compared to Nottingham’s cuts of £71 per household.
Nottingham has received nothing from the grant.
Nottingham City Council has asked the Government for details of how they decided to allocate funds through Freedom of Information requests and Parliamentary Questions for over a year.
But key questions remain unanswered, the authority says.
Nottingham City Council Deputy Leader, Graham Chapman, said: “These new heat maps show us graphically for the first time the real picture of the unfair way the money from the Transition Grant Scheme was handed out across the country.
“We can clearly see how the largest pots of funding has been concentrated in Conservative councils in the south of the country while more northerly, predominantly Labour councils have received little or nothing.
“All the time our questions about this scheme continue to go unanswered, the whiff of scandal around the Transition Grant Funding scheme will persist – especially when significant question-marks remain over funding for Surrey County Council which is the largest beneficiary of this scheme.
“It’s time for the Government to open up on this matter and let us know why decisions were taken and where they found the money to do this.”
A spokesman for the Department for Communities and Local Government said: “Our long-term settlement for local government ensures councils facing the highest demand for services continue to receive more funding.
“Nottingham City Council will receive nearly £1 billion to spend between now and 2020 on local services, in a settlement that was agreed by local leaders.
“Just last week, this government announced an additional £2 billion for social care, meaning councils will have £9.2 billion of dedicated funding to spend over the course of this parliament.”
