Keir Starmer has told voters he cannot “turn the taps on” to fix the crisis in local authority funding as he was quizzed on how Labour would plug councils’ £4bn gap at the launch of its local election campaign.
“I can’t pretend that we could turn the taps on to pretend the damage hasn’t been done to the economy – it has,” he said. “There’s no magic money tree that we can waggle the day after the election. No, they’ve broken the economy, they’ve done huge damage.”
Starmer was speaking from a podium in Dudley in the West Midlands, where Boris Johnson previously launched the Conservatives’ levelling up pledge in 2020, a policy the Labour leader said had “unforgivably” failed.
“In saying levelling up, the government was tapping into something real that people yearn for. But they didn’t have a viable plan, and they didn’t do the hard yards. That’s unforgivable,” he said.
The choice of location was seen as a direct challenge to Andy Street, the West Midlands mayor, who will be fighting Labour’s Richard Parker for his third term as mayor in the region.
In his opening speech at the launch event, Parker accused Street of “working hard to pretend he’s not a Tory”, as he pledged to build more council homes and create 150,000 jobs in the region.
On Wednesday evening, the Labour leaders of four West Midlands councils, including Birmingham which declared itself effectively bankrupt last year, sent an open letter to Street to declare their “loss of confidence” in his ability to lead the region.
They cited his criticism of local councils (which help fund the West Midlands combined authority Street leads), “unfounded claims of success” and said he was using the council funding crisis “for political gain”.
The letter did not have the support of all Labour councillors though, with one denouncing it as “petty political point scoring”.
Starmer declined to comment on whether bankruptcies at Labour-led councils would have an impact on the local elections in May, saying the party would introduce a better funding settlement to help local authorities manage their budgets.
He also said he had hoped to have been launching a general election campaign at the event, but said Rishi Sunak had “bottled it” by not yet calling one and that the prime minister wants “one last drawn-out summer tour”.
“The mayoral and local elections, and later in the year the national election, go together,” he said. “This is the first of a two part series. We have gone from a party that suffered the worst loss since 1935, to a serious contender as we go into that election.”
However, he warned that in order to achieve “even a two or three seat Labour majority” would require a bigger swing than in 1997, when Labour won a landslide victory against Labour with a 179-seat majority.
“That is a sobering thought,” he said. “Put the polls to one side, it’s the hard yards of focus and discipline.”
