Peadar Tóibín (Meath West, Sinn Fein)
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To ask the Minister for Environment, Community and Local Government if he will detail the local government grant amount for each local authority, town and county, throughout the State as per capita; and if he will outline efforts to redress any differences between the local government grant allocated to Navan and Meath and the State average. [3962/13]

Peadar Tóibín (Meath West, Sinn Fein)
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To ask the Minister for Environment, Community and Local Government the local government grant amount for each local authority, town and county, throughout the State per capita; if he will make efforts to equalise the difference between the local government grant allocated to Navan and Meath and the State average. [4192/13]

Phil Hogan (Carlow-Kilkenny, Fine Gael)
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I propose to take Questions Nos. 522 and 530 together.

I assume that the Questions refer to general purpose grants from the Local Government Fund. General purpose grants are my Department’s contribution towards meeting the cost to local authorities of providing a reasonable level of services to their customers. These grants continue to make a significant contribution to the revenue funding of local authorities. I was pleased to announce general purpose grant allocations for 2013 totalling €640m, a slight decrease of 1.7% on the initial allocation for 2012. Meath County Council’s 2013 allocation is some €21.25m, a decrease of 2% on the 2012 allocation, whereas Navan County Council’s allocation of €472,699 represents an increase of 20.5% on its 2012 allocation.

Local authorities cost and income bases vary significantly from one another and calculating an appropriate distribution of these grants is complex. General purpose grants from the Local Government Fund are structured to bring about equalisation over time; that is a position of balance where the financial needs of local authorities are met by their resources and they are able to provide an appropriate level of service to their customers. In determining these grants a number of factors are taken into account including the overall funding available for this purpose, the estimated cost to each authority of providing a reasonable level of services to their customers, the income each authority should generate from local sources and the necessity to provide each authority with a baseline allocation that will support its financial stability. Any system designed to align funding solely or mainly on a per capita basis would ignore important differences between local authority cost and income bases.

The most recent population information can be obtained from 2011 census data available on the Central Statistics Office’s website at www.cso.ie. The 2013 General purpose grant allocations are set out in the following table.