Councils lose faith in hopes of a fair deal North councils have always maintained that they have been unfairly funded by Central Government. They say the local Government funding formula has always favoured areas with greater populations, particularly the South-East, and a recent change in the calculations met with little enthusiasm. The local education authorities' problems have been worse in the region's most rural and sparsely populated areas. For Northumberland, the rural nature of one of Britain's largest but least populated areas means that it already spends a disproportionate amount on transport and keeping small but strategically important schools open. And this has been compounded by years of underfunding which has left it with a £50m repair bill for its schools. To make things worse this year, for the second year running, the LEA missed out on a lucrative PFI bid - worth £111m - which would have gone a long way to solving this repair bill problem and to meeting the reduction of 7,000 surplus places. All LEAs have to reduce their surplus places by 10pc by 2006. But the need to do this has, in the case of Northumberland, perhaps been overtaken by the budget crisis this year and warnings over mass job cuts for teachers and teaching assistants, whose headteachers face budget deficits running into hundreds of thousands of pounds. Coun Jim Wright, the county's cabinet member for education, says the closure of some schools is inevitable if the issues of surplus places and unfair funding are to be tackled. As he says himself, county councillors have been forced to take the matter into their own hands as they have lost faith they will ever get a fair deal from the Government. The Journal: Today's Voice of the North | 
