Wednesday afternoon brought us the Autumn Budget. Subtitled “Fixing the Foundations to Deliver Change”, the budget indeed focuses on the basics of the economy, fiscal context/rules, public services, and investment.

The Budget has a bit of a retro 1970s feel, tackling big issues like macroeconomic stability, reducing borrowing, and fixing low productivity. It is the sort of budget where you can use the table of contents to have a good idea of where announcements will be. There is clear logic to it and its structure—it doesn’t read like a collection of press releases promoting disparate funding pots and random schemes.

In this article, I summarise the key points from the Autumn Budget statement (with a bit of help from Microsoft CoPilot) before concluding with my own reflections on what this means for places.

Key Points

Economic Stability:

• Strengthening the fiscal framework with new rules to ensure sustainable public finances.
• Aiming for a surplus in the current budget by 2029–30.

Public Services:

• NHS: Significant investment to reduce waiting times and improve services.
• Education: Increased funding for schools and further education.
• Local Government: Real terms increase in core spending power.

Investment:

• Over £100 billion in capital investment over the next five years.
• Focus on transport, housing, and R&D to drive long-term growth.

Tax and Revenue:

• No increases in income tax, National Insurance, or VAT rates.
• Increase in employer National Insurance contributions and Capital Gains Tax rates.
• New measures to close tax loopholes and ensure fair tax contributions.

Cost of Living Support:

• Increase in the National Living Wage.
• Extension of the Household Support Fund.
• Uprating of working-age benefits and the State Pension.

Environmental and Energy Policies:

• Investment in carbon capture and storage, and renewable energy projects.
• Support for the transition to electric vehicles and energy-efficient homes.
  
  

Departmental Settlements

• Health and Social Care: £22.6 billion increase in resource spending by 2025–26.
• Education: £11.2 billion increase in resource spending by 2025–26.
• Transport: Continued investment in major projects like HS2 (London/Birmingham) and East–West Rail.
• Energy Security: Funding for Great British Energy and carbon capture projects.
  
  

Reforms and Efficiency

• Public Sector Productivity: A 2% productivity, efficiency, and savings target for government departments.
• Fraud and Error: Measures to reduce fraud and error in the welfare system, saving £4.3 billion by 2029–30.
• Tax Compliance: Recruitment of additional compliance staff and modernisation of HMRC systems.
  
  

Long-Term Plans

• 10-Year Health Plan: Focus on shifting care from hospitals to community settings and increasing NHS productivity.
• Industrial Strategy: Support for key sectors like aerospace, automotive, and life sciences.
• Devolution and Local Growth: Integrated settlements for Greater Manchester and the West Midlands, and support for local growth initiatives.
  
  

What Does This Budget Mean for Places?

As we wrote in our news article after the General Election:

“We need national government to develop and implement policy that tackles the ‘big issues’ – economic growth, sustainability, inequality…”

These are foundational issues—address these nationally and then, as we said: “Local government, working in full collaboration with their communities [can] make visible and meaningful change to places.”

Our experience running the High Streets Task Force has shown us, first-hand, the enormous capacity and capability gaps that exist in local government. These deficiencies prevent them from playing a much more meaningful and positive role in support of the places they serve. Does the budget go far enough in putting local authorities on a firmer financial footing? I’d say no.

Yes, there is an increase in core spending, and yes, there is more grant funding, more money for adult & children’s care and homelessness. Yet, whilst the budget says “the government is committed to returning the sector to sustainability” (p.55), a recent in-depth analysis of the funding crisis in local government by my esteemed friends Professor Andy Pike and Jack Shaw estimated English councils face a funding deficit of £9.3bn in 2026/27.

From my ‘back of an envelope’ calculations, I think the additional funding in this budget only solves half that problem. In other words, there will still be significant pressure on local authorities to reduce services, and not engage in ‘non-statutory’ activities like place management despite £5bn of additional investment.

What’s the Good News?

Place is one of the pillars of the government’s growth mission, so important policies like the industrial strategy and other long-term plans like health will take a more place-based approach. There are lots of mentions in the budget of devolved working with regional and combined authorities. It’s not the scale of ‘place’ that most people reading this article will be familiar with. Nevertheless, I’m taking it as good news and will get ready to show how regional/combined authorities can empower and enable real local place leadership—to drive growth, improve health, etc. There is likely to be more settlement money coming for this as the government reaffirms its commitment in the budget to move away from competitions, and better support local leaders (p.69).

What will cheer many people up is the commitment of just under £1bn to extend Shared Prosperity Funding for a year, whilst further funding reform is undertaken. Likewise, there is a commitment for the Long-Term Plan for Towns to “be retained and reformed into a new regeneration programme.” (p.68).

The funding for MHCLG’s core Levelling Up Fund projects was also confirmed, “providing £1 billion in 2025–26 to revitalise high streets, town centres and communities”. (Although the Levelling Up Culture projects are likely to be axed (p.96)—the projects at risk can be found here.

And Business Rates?

As expected, the budget addressed Business Rates. Although, perhaps, not quite as radically as some may have hoped—not yet anyway—but there is the promise of “industry dialogue.” In terms of actual commitment (p.130):

• In 2025–26, eligible retail, hospitality and leisure (RHL) properties in England will receive 40% relief on their business rates liability (it's currently 75%). RHL properties will be eligible to receive support up to a cash cap of £110,000 per business.
• For 2025–26, the small business multiplier in England will be frozen at 49.9p. The government will lay secondary legislation to freeze the small business multiplier. The standard multiplier will be uprated by the September 2024 CPI rate to 55.5p.
• The government intends to introduce permanently lower multipliers for Retail, Hospitality and Leisure (RHL) properties from 2026–27, paid for by a higher multiplier for properties with Rateable Values above £500,000.
  
  

And Finally…

There are more announcements that are also positive, if not a bit more tangential:

• Tax relief and growing the talent pipeline in the creative industries.
• Lots of transport investment in different modes.
• £40m for shorter apprenticeships.
• Significant investment in health, including place-based schemes to target health conditions that drive economic inactivity. 
• Development of mental health crisis centres.
• Eight Youth Guarantee Trailblazer areas to test new ways of supporting young people into employment or training, by bringing together and enhancing existing programmes in partnership with local areas.
• Confirmation of funding for a variety of place-based growth projects and enterprise/investment zones. You’ll know if you have one of these or not—there are no new announcements.
• Both Help to Grow training and Growth Hubs will continue to be funded
• To support pubs and small breweries, a 1p cut on alcohol duty on average-strength draught products from February next year.
• And finally, finally, the budget announced a new consultation on “enabling more guest beers” from smaller brewers. As chance has it, we have some high-quality published research we can submit to that!
  
  

What's next?

Despite promising signs for regeneration and devolution the long-term viability of many town and city centres, through the genuine empowerment of partnerships and place leaders, will need greater focus. We will be using the next few months to talk to Members, Partners, MPs and Civil Servants through roundtables and other meetings to understand the impact of these announcements. We will do everything we can to ensure our research and professional network can shape details for the type of "foundation fixing" that's still needed at the local level. 

About the author

Cathy Parker

Cathy is Professor of Retail and Marketing Enterprise at Manchester Metropolitan University, Co-Chair of IPM and Research Lead for the Government's High Streets Task Force.