The Inner Circle View on the Autumn Budget

The Autumn Budget has significant implications for local government, public services, and the communities we work side by side with. Here are our team's thoughts on what stood out to them.

Chris Naylor, Managing Director

Those of us committed to supporting public institutions that can help grow our economy and prevent harm know after this Budget  - now more than ever - that real innovation and change will need to be driven by regional and local public services. 

This was a spend now, tax later Budget that failed to deliver a wider vision or method for public service reform and with it the prospects for long term financial sustainability.  This feels like a Budget designed for survival, rather than foundational basis for growth and prevention. By that yard stick, it seems to have worked.

The pivot to supporting the poorest children must be welcome. As too, commitments to keep raising the minimum wage . Basic economic security is a pre-requisite for any preventive system.   

But elsewhere reforms were muted, uncoordinated, lacking in confidence or consigned to the false hope of yet more pilots. By way of example : piloting total place budgeting is a bit like piloting the concept of breathing. It's so obviously the right thing to do, that the fact that Whitehall still thinks it needs to be tested reveals a chasm of misunderstanding between central and local government. 

Now should be the time for central government to be thinking about how it lets go of more power, rather than how much it can still control.

Alexa Ngini, Senior Consultant

The Budget offers a more positive direction on SEND, with additional high-needs funding and an acknowledgement that both historic and future DSG deficits must be addressed. However, this falls short of a fully costed guarantee: the scale of national deficits and rising demand means councils still face uncertainty until the Finance Settlement provides detail. Beyond SEND, the overall picture for local authorities remains challenging. The new council tax surcharge breaks the principle that all council tax is retained locally, with no immediate benefit to council budgets. Business rates changes are revenue-neutral due to compensation but create extra administrative demands. Major pressures in adult social care, children’s services and temporary accommodation remain unresolved, and most new investment tools are concentrated in mayoral areas. While the Budget introduces some helpful measures, particularly on SEND, it does not repair structural funding gaps, leaving many councils facing continued financial strain and heightened delivery risk.

James Masini, Principal

There’s a lot of focus on the new Mansion Tax but we shouldn’t lose sight of what the budget means for the vast majority of us who don’t live in a house worth more than £2m. 

Whilst the boost to wages for the country’s lowest earners will make life easier in short term, we still need to see more tangible, structural solutions to the housing crisis. The nation still lacks a proper first-time buyer product which would have catapulted contraction and eased pressure in the rental market - amendments to Lifetime ISAs will help but it’s several years out and feels like another doodle in the margin.  Speaking of renters, it feels like the government has missed a golden opportunity to review the Local Housing Allowance rates which would have pro-actively kept families out of homelessness whilst generating little more that a murmur to the national coffers. 

With housing shake-ups announced earlier in the autumn, this was never going to be a big budget for our sector but the pressures we see at councils nationwide haven’t disappeared. We’ll continue supporting them to drive supply and think strategically about their most pressing issues across housing and regeneration.

Lucy Webb, Director

Despite the backdrop of deep fiscal challenges, this budget gives us a lot to be hopeful about.  A number of commitments to delivering (long-lobbied for) major infrastructure projects that will be the key to unlocking thousands of new homes and delivering critical regeneration initiatives in a number of our most challenged communities.  Along with green book review pilots and area-based budgets that all have a chance of reframing why and how we invest in place and to drive systemic change and opportunity for those communities.  And an extension of business rate retention schemes and the new tourism levy to support local authorities to reinvest in their areas.  Last, but my no means least, new towns.  The three front-runners name checked and the commitment to get spades in the ground this parliament.  A strong theme across all is the focus on delivery and delivery now. So we need to get on with making this happen, and quickly, but it is on all of us in the sector to make sure this pace is not at the expense of doing it well.  And a need to have impact quickly in the areas that matter most to local people whilst creating the communities of today and tomorrow that we can all be proud of being a part of.  We’ll be releasing further thoughts on this subject in particular next week, so watch this space…

Olly Swann, Director

The timing of the Budget was interesting for our team on the ground at the National Children & Adult Services Conference (NCASC) in Bournemouth.  Both the Local Government Association (LGA) and Association of Directors of Adult Social Services (ADASS) had set out their cases for longer-term funding agreements for the sector, but as expected, not much appeared.

Despite headline increases in funding for social care and health through to 2028/29, the sums being made available fall far short of the budget gaps forecast by the sector. The ‘and health’ element, understandably,  always adds a layer of cynicism from local government. Spending on social care has failed to keep pace with demographic change; demand is growing, and the prevalence of complex needs continues to drive up costs. 30 local authorities are receiving Exceptional Financial Support from the Government in 2025/26 and social care costs, given their scale, are often cited as one of the key contributors to this.

In terms of Special Educational Needs & Disability (SEND), whilst the general feeling was positive about the commitment to absorbing the costs of SEND spending from 2028/29, concerns prevail about how existing deficits will be addressed, which are pushing many councils to the financial brink. With no clarity on how these liabilities will be dealt with at the end of the newly extended override period, they represent a substantial ongoing fiscal risk. All eyes are now on the Schools White Paper (next year?) to set out the framework for comprehensive reforms.

Removing the two-child limit from Universal Credit was probably the Budget highlight; this will alleviate the pressure on thousands of our most financially challenged families and lift an estimated 400,000 children and young people out of poverty.  Whilst welcomed, the message from conference was clear; the long-awaited child poverty strategy must now offer an ambitious and multifaceted way forward to truly change childhoods for the better.

Katy Rutherford, Senior Consultant and Roland Karthaus, Managing Consultant

Neighbourhoods should be at the heart of health and wellbeing, not only as drivers of economic growth but as enablers of happiness, resilience, and sustainability. Co-locating health services locally makes sense, yet past initiatives like the Healthy Living Centres struggled to create lasting change. So, what’s different this time?

Across the UK, innovative models are emerging—from Greater Manchester’s LiveWell programme to Fleetwood’s Community Hub and Westminster’s Health & Wellbeing Worker Programme. These examples show that physical centres alone aren’t enough. Neighbourhood Health Centres must become the centre of a wider ecosystem, harnessing community strengths and assets to build and support informal care networks, peer support approaches, active travel, green spaces, and more. Empowering communities with agency is key to creating healthier places.

 At ICC, we’re exploring how Neighbourhood Health Centres can become the 'kernel 'of place-based health and wellbeing - so this time, the ambition translates into meaningful, sustainable change.