Forget War, Pandemics and Climate Change, Potholes are the real problem!

While the news these days is dominated by one international crisis after another, and plenty of political drama at a national level, what really drives everyday people nuts is potholes....

And not just potholes, but a whole host of other mundane issues that hits closer to home. Broken pavements, overflowing bins, the fight for parking, traffic jams, anti-social behaviour—the basic stuff people rely on. All the small things that tell you whether your town is actually working or quietly falling apart.

Political journalists love to pick apart ideologies and leaders, but most people spend more time cursing the state of the roads outside their homes. It is, after all, this that see up close, day in day out.

Local polling during the elections in fact informed us that roads and transport topped voters’ worries. And maybe this shouldn't surprise us: People don’t bump into MPs, but they drive on council roads, watch their rubbish get collected—or not—and see what’s happening to their parks and libraries.

If you want to know how people really feel about government, look at how those services run. Lately, a lot of people feel they’re not running at all.

The problem....

In a nutshell it's 15 years of austerity for local councils - they've had massive cuts to their budget and massively rising costs for the treble whammy of adult social care, special education needs and emergency accommodation.

And those three things together take up an enormous chunk of many local council's budgets... and that's with the standards of service being not that great at all, frankly.

And this means less money to spend on everything else and so all council services get worse!

Meanwhile, council tax keeps going up. It makes no sense to anyone paying it—why does more money buy worse services? Because those increases get swallowed by the basics: social care, and other mandatory costs no one’s figured out how to rein in. Councils charge more, but people get less. It’s political poison.

And swapping out one party for another at the town hall? That won’t fix it. The problems are baked in. Britain’s population is getting older, social care is still a massive headache, business rates don’t work, more kids need extra help, and housing shortages drive up temporary accommodation costs.

Unless those big things change, local councils stay stuck. More cuts, higher bills, services getting squeezed.

We basically need to the government, whatever government, to get on top of how to fund the basics so people's council tax can go back to paying for what matters to them on a day to day basis, and that means potholes filled and bins emptied.