Funding for local government and public toilet provision

That this House believes that public toilets are essential social infrastructure, vital for public health and inclusion, and necessary for people with long term conditions, disabilities, young children, homeless people and others of all ages to get out and about; notes that toilet provision was discussed during the passage of the Levelling Up and Regeneration Bill, with the Minister stating this was a fundamentally local issue; further notes that if central Government systematically strips funding so that Local Government has faced a 63% real terms budget reduction between 2010-11 and 2022-23 based on Treasury figures, this has an impact on services, and public toilet provision becomes a fundamentally national issue; welcomes the recent increase in core spending power in this year’s local government finance settlement but considers it wholly insufficient to counter the impact of a decade of drastic cuts on the future financial sustainability of councils on a cliff-edge; urges the Government to consider that people are starting to push for national legislation on provision of toilets out of desperation, because Ministers are washing their hands of their responsibilities to ensure local authorities can properly fund the local services they want to make available to their communities; and calls on Ministers to fully reverse the cuts to local government budgets since 2010 in order to enable the provision and restoration of vital local services.