Adam Harmsworth, Coventry Socialist Party
Socialist Party members have been helping Your Party supporters build for this Coventry People’s Budget conference on 17 January. We contacted trade union branches, community organisations, and charities to invite them.
Socialist Party campaign stalls promoted the conference, and we supported Coventry Your Party stalls doing the same. Reaching out to the working class in this way is crucial to establish a force in the elections that is fighting to restore services and to connect with the working class.
The conference itself, attended by more than 60 people, delivered a fantastic set of proposals to drastically improve people’s lives. The Socialist Party’s Dave Nellist and Coventry Your Party councillor Grace Lewis introduced the discussion, explaining how Coventry’s Labour council is still making things worse for us in the city (see below). Coventry Your Party MP, Zarah Sultana, spoke too.
There were so many ideas from the floor, by the end of the conference, four flipchart pages were filled!
Public sector workers called for decent parental leave for all council staff, along with a four-day week and £15-an-hour minimum wage. A parent proposed ‘baby boxes’ with provisions for all new parents, and free schools meals for all children, throughout the entire year.
Underfunded
A teacher called for restoring and fully staffing our libraries and extending their opening hours so all workers can access them. The teacher and others referred to the horrendous underfunding of schools, while strikes are ongoing in the city about exactly that.
Several speakers lamented the housing crisis, and demanded licensing of landlords, rent controls, and the acquisition of empty homes and land hoarded by developers, and for a mass council house-building programme. Alongside that, building and improving homes with insulation and solar power to ensure energy efficiency.
These measures would also contribute to fighting climate change, along with a properly funded, publicly owned transport network that could include buses, trains, park-and-ride schemes, and trams to vital services, like the local hospital.
That is only a portion of the proposals. It showed that people want far more to improve their city. That’s certainly more than Labour’s plans and tax rises on workers, likewise from Tories and Reform.
The next step is to boil down four pages of brilliant ideas into an anti-austerity socialist programme to take into May’s council elections. All 54 seats are up for election. The Socialist Party is calling for the widest possible stand on a programme to fight for the working class of this city, instead of the super-rich.
The conference also discussed how the council chamber can be a vital voice for other causes. When Dave Nellist was a Socialist Party councillor, he used his position to support the protests against the Iraq War and the Israeli state’s attacks on Gaza at the time. He also backed the 2010 student demonstrations against tuition fee rises and opposed cuts to grants for college students.
Today, elected positions could be used to support the campaign to end parking charges at the hospital, build opposition to the Israeli state’s genocidal attacks on Palestinians, demand socialist nationalisation of transport and energy, and more.
The truth behind Labour’s funding ‘boost’ for councils?
Dave Nellist, Coventry Socialist Party
The background to our People’s Budget conference was the Labour government’s funding announcement for English councils for 2026-27. For the first time in many years, Coventry Council is not proposing further cuts. The two local Labour MPs called government’s funding a “fantastic” £180 million boost over three years.
But all is not what it seems.
Only part of the £180 million is new national funding. £77 million (43%) is locally raised. A third – £58 million – will be raised directly from Coventry residents, via a 5% council tax increase in each of the next three years.
Another portion will be eroded by inflation. Consumer inflation reached nearly 4% by the end of 2025. But inflation in local authority services, such as social care, was twice as high, further reducing the impact of government funding.
A further proportion will be spread across Coventry’s rising population, which stood at 396,000 last year, and is expected to reach 412,000 by the end of the three years.
Since 2010, Coventry has lost £1.6 billion in central government funding – an annual average loss of £100 million. The recent Labour government announcement does nothing to restore the funding cut by austerity.
Coventry Council’s staff has been cut from 14,000 in 2010 to 5,000 today. We’ve lost libraries, youth and community centres, youth workers, park wardens, street cleaners, and staff handling housing benefits and council tax support.
Coventry, once the richest working-class city in the country, now has 14 food banks, but not enough social workers to address the problems in the city. There is a need for better, cheaper bus services, and a mass programme of building new council housing.
Finally, this ‘new money’ is not government generosity. Most of it is reallocated from other local authorities.
£2.1 billion has been cut from the budgets of 186 local councils, so that Coventry and another 160 councils are said to have an increase. Socialist candidates in the May council elections should loudly demand the restoration of the money stolen from local authorities over the past 16 years.
And together with local trade unions, be prepared to mobilise people to fight for that money to come from central government, not stolen from other local authorities.
