Housing Support Grant: development of a funding formula

The report recommended the following steps to developing a new funding formula for the Housing Support Grant:

• adhere to local government settlement precedents
• use 2019/2020 Spending Plans to guide formula design
•  adjust for rurality or sparsity
• adjust to address maximum changes in funding
• design transitional arrangements

The key findings from the proposed formula are:

• reallocation of a fixed budget will result in some local authorities receiving more funding
• levelling out the distinct variation from the existing Supporting People allocation sees 12 local authorities experience a funding change of 10% or more (either an increase or a decrease)
• the relative funding allocation is considerably more evenly spread on a per capita basis under the new funding formula
• some of the local authorities that see the largest falls in their funding allocations remain among the best funded in relative terms