This month, Calvin Bailey, MP for Leyton and Wanstead secured a Westminster Hall debate on London Local Government to highlight the critical financial challenges we are facing.

Calvin led other London Labour MPs, including Rachel Blake, Bambos Charalambous, Danny Beales, Helen Hayes and Dan Tomlinson in debate. He raised concerns from a Waltham Forest perspective – including the importance of reforming the local government funding formula to take account of deprivation levels, housing need and population growth. He highlighting the fact that Waltham Forest is an outer London borough with inner London need. We receive less money than our inner-London neighbours as also our key workers such as police officers and teachers are paid less. Our borough received 2.5 times less public health funding per person than Kensington and Chelsea, despite higher levels of deprivation. He called for ‘special consideration’ for outer London in the Government’s planned funding review.  

Calvin also praised Waltham Forest for our track record on housing delivery – we are the forth highest social home builder nationally. More widely, he warned that the most acute financial pressure facing London boroughs was homelessness – which as a human as well an economic cost for residents in our borough. He added that this was boroughs’ fastest growing financial risk and called for the Government to raise levels of Local Housing Allowance for temporary accommodation. 

We are really proud of Calvin for speaking up for our area. Alex Norris, Minister for Building Safety and Local Growth responded on behalf of the Government, emphasising the increase London local government has seen since Labour came to power and the Government’s commitment to multi-year funding settlements and wider funding reform.