‘We built a game that lets you run a council. Nobody can win it’

Ever got annoyed about missed bins, potholes, or a library closing? Most of us have. And when it happens, the instinct is obvious: why can’t the council just get the basics right?

So we built a game that lets you try.

In Run the Council, you take charge of a fictional authority, Northfield Council, for four years. The premise is simple, but the game less so. You have to run a council against mounting financial pressures, trying not to cut public services or hike council tax, all with half an eye on being re-elected.

Each year you’re presented with the same dilemma. Adult social care costs are rising, faster than your budget can keep up. So you raise council tax, which hits poorer households harder, but is one of the only levers that councils have left. You cut spending on parks, libraries, and road repairs. You charge for garden waste collection. You close a youth club. You do what you have to.

READ MORE: ‘Why Total Place is vital for Labour’s chance of reforming public services’

But – spoiler – you can’t win. At some point, you are forced into choices that feel politically unacceptable or practically impossible. If you try to avoid both, you’ll go bankrupt. Ultimately, this is the point of the game. What it is trying to show is that for councils this isn’t simply always a story about competence or priorities. It’s a story about a financing system that no longer works.

And the numbers behind the game are real. In 2025/26, 350 out of 384 councils in England raised council tax by close to or at the maximum amount permitted. Not because they wanted to, but because social care costs left them no choice.

Most people still see their councils as providing everyday services like bins and pothole repair. We polled 1,697 adults and asked them to estimate how much councils spend on adult social care. The average guess was 13%. The real figure is 39%, the single largest item in councils’ budget in England, and growing yearly. This difference between perception and reality is because only 3.6% of older people receive local authority-funded long-term social care but every household puts their bin out.

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A tax paying for services people don’t see has broken the link between people and their councils. And it doesn’t matter who you vote for. Every council ends up doing the same thing in practice, because they all face the same structural squeeze.

Labour Together have set out how to solve this in our new paper Fixing the shop front of the state.

We propose that central government takes over the funding of adult social care. Councils would no longer have to cut the provision of library and park services in the aim of providing support and services for adults with disabilities, long-term illness, or age-related frailty but instead would receive a ring fenced sum, similar to the school grant. They could focus on the services that matter to the day-to-day lives of the majority of voters: education, bins, parks, libraries, culture. This would free councils to fix the shop front of the state.

Right now, that shop front is falling apart, and councils are in no position to try to address it. If running Northfield Council feels impossible, it’s because for many real councils, it isn’t far off. We can change that, but only if we’re honest about where the problem actually sits. Not at the level of individual decisions, but in the system those decisions are made in.

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