New Cabinet Office Minister Says There Is "Massive Waste" In How Local Councils Are Funded
Georgia Gould is a new Labour MP and newly-appointed government minister (Alamy)
6 min read
New Cabinet Office minister Georgia Gould has said having local councils bid against each other has led to “massive waste” and that the Labour government would bring a “new era of partnership” between local, central and regional government.
Just over a week ago, Gould was elected as MP for Queen's Park and Maida Vale for the first time. Only a few days later, she was appointed Parliamentary Secretary in the Cabinet Office. At the time of speaking to PoliticsHome, it is still so early in her ministerial career that she did not yet know what her specific brief would be.
She is one of five newly-elected Labour MPs to be given ministerial jobs by Prime Minister Keir Starmer following his General Election victory.
“We're still kind of working out exactly how we're going to divide things up between us, but the thing that's absolutely clear is the Cabinet Office is going to be there to help drive through the missions for our government,” Gould said, describing the department as the “engine room” for making Labour’s six steps and five missions for government happen.
Gould, at the age of 38, has already been a Labour councillor for 14 years and the leader of Camden Council in London since 2017 – which, she said, has taught her an “enormous amount” about the running of local and national government.
A cross-party committee of MPs warned earlier this year that the financial crisis facing England's councils is "out of control" and that the Government must plug a £4bn funding gap to avoid a "severe impact" on services. At the start of 2024, nearly one in five council leaders in England said they were likely to declare bankruptcy in the next 15 months. Many of the councils that have already gone bankrupt have been Labour-run administrations.
“It's a massive issue, there are massive funding gaps for councils,” Gould said.
“But also one of the things that has been really difficult for us is the instability of funding, short term bits of money that we all have to bid against each other. It’s a massive waste spending our time bidding for these tiny pots rather than taking a strategic, long term view alongside councils.”
The new minister said the Conservatives had left Labour in a “really difficult financial position”, but that she was sure they could make investment “work much better” for local government.
“I see it as an era of a new partnership between central and local government: stable funding and long term investment together,” she said.
“If we work differently together, we can save a huge amount of money and improve public services, there's a massive opportunity. I've chaired London councils. I have been a vice chair of the Local Government Association. I've seen around the country what local government can do, but also the waste of money when central government doesn't work effectively with local government.
"So the partnership is so important, and missions are going to be a really important tool to have us all working in the same direction.”
Some key experiences while serving as leader of Camden Council have shaped Gould’s political outlook. In 2017, shortly after she took on the role, the Grenfell Tower fire killed 72 people in North Kensington.
“The devastation of that we all still feel, but we in Camden had five blocks that had very similar cladding [to Grenfell], and the fire brigade ended up ordering an evacuation of those blocks,” she said.
“And the night before that happened, residents in those blocks identified almost all of the issues that the fire brigade then said made those homes unsafe with the cladding the next day. We as a council had not been listening deeply enough to those residents and we, as a result of that, put them at risk.”
Georgia Gould published a book in 2015 titled Wasted: How Misunderstanding Young Britain Threatens Our Future (Alamy)
Gould said she therefore wanted to ensure that “listening deeply to our communities” was integral at the centre of government as it would result in more effective public services.
She said her local government experience has also taught her how to operate on a shoestring budget, with sweeping cuts to public services having affected local authorities across the country over the last decade.
“Most of us in local government have lost at least half of our budget, so we've learned how to still deliver for our residents in times of constrained resources, and never losing our ambition and making every single pound count in delivering public services,” Gould said.
“Despite all those cuts as a council leader, we still managed to build new council houses, to invest in prevention, my council having outstanding Children's Services, youth funding services, and really continuing to be ambitious.”
It is fair to say that Labour politics runs in Gould’s blood. She is the daughter of Baron Gould of Brookwood, who was a key adviser in the Labour Party’s election strategies from 1987 up to 2005, and Baroness Rebuck, a Labour peer. Gould was pictured as a baby on the front cover of the Private Eye in the run-up to the 1987 general election with then-Labour leader Neil Kinnock, and spent her childhood surrounded by top New Labour figures such as the Blair family, Alastair Campbell, and Baroness Jowell.
She told PoliticsHome that she is “completely behind” the new PM as he had shown her as a local London MP that he “deeply listens to people”.
Keir Starmer joined Georgia Gould in her constituency during the General Election campaign (Alamy)
“In Camden, we really tragically had a number of young people who lost their lives and I asked Keir to co-chair a youth safety task force, which he did, and he spent a lot of time talking to young people, talking to bereaved families,” she said.
“One thing that really said something about who Keir is, was in the middle of a very busy day in Parliament [in 2021], we had a really tragic loss of a young life, and he just left all of that to come and spend an hour with the young man's mum – no media, he didn't tell anyone what he was doing because he deeply cared.
“He worked with us to bring out the police, the council, youth and voluntary services to develop a whole plan to reduce knife violence – which has happened in Camden, we've massively reduced it.”
Gould said she believed that what she had seen in Starmer at a local level would be replicated on the national stage: “The way he deeply listens to people. It doesn't matter who he is meeting, he doesn't want to be late for them, he wants to hear them.”
The new MP for Queen's Park and Maida Vale has perhaps been preparing for this moment for her whole life, but is now faced with the reality of the “sense of responsibility” of government.
“There is just a huge amount of energy,” Gould said.
“The thing that people [new MPs] have been saying to each other most is just the sense of responsibility that people have voted for us as Labour MPs because they want to see a change and that we have to deliver for them.”
And how would Gould sum up her feelings about the months ahead as part of the new government? "Privileged and optimistic.”
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