The Guardian view on council funding: cheap politics, bad policy | Editorial

The whole philosophy of how to pay for local services is about to change, and it doesn't look good

The Guardian's analysis of who in Britain is housing and educating the refugees and asylum seekers who should be shared across the country shows that the responsibility falls on fewer than a third of councils. That is not only a shaming example of how many prosperous local authorities have found ways to avoid the appeal to help, which is bleakly revealed in the raw numbers showing that Labour-led authorities have taken 11.6 asylum seekers per 10,000 population, compared with just 0.7 in Conservative-led ones (and only four refugees live in the prime minister's Maidenhead constituency). Nor is it simply more evidence of how unequal Britain is becoming from city to city, and from inner city to leafy suburb. Nor merely a badly designed plan that urgently needs revising. It is a vivid illustration of how those councils that have rather than those that have not are being favoured by government policy.

Local government finance may be a strong contender for the most boring and complex subject in politics, but what it lacks in thrills it gains in its sheer impact on ordinary lives. That is why the current re-engineering of the way it is funded, trailed two years ago when George Osborne announced that councils would be allowed to keep all their business rate income by 2020, is both among the most important and the least discussed questions in a Whitehall dominated by Brexit.