The services we rely on every day are often the ones closest to home. Defending the country and keeping our streets safe are the first duties of any government. But it is our councils that fix the roads, run social care, support children with special educational needs and shape what gets built in our towns and villages.

So how councils are funded matters to every household in our cross-county constituency. Labour has just rewritten the rules, and our area is paying the price.

The Government calls it the “Fair Funding Review”. Put simply, it is a new formula for sharing out central government money between councils. Under it, Surrey loses more than £50 million of government funding this year and around £182 million over three years, a harder hit than any other area in the country. Hampshire County Council loses £10.9 million this year, rising to almost £40 million a year within three years.

Ministers will tell you councils’ “spending power” is going up. What they leave out is that their own sums assume your council raises your bill by the maximum allowed every single year. The Government is counting the extra council tax you pay as if it were its own money. That is not investment. It is a bill handed to you.

Within three years, around 92p in every pound Surrey spends will come from local council tax. Hampshire is now the lowest-funded shire county – mostly rural – in England per head. The County Councils Network found that for every £1 of new costs counties face, the Government will cover just 2p, while big city councils get 42p.

Labour calls this fair. In reality it is the politics of envy: penalising areas seen as well off, and councils that have kept bills down, to send money to Labour’s urban heartlands. Ministers even watered down the extra recognition for the higher cost of delivering services across rural areas, where homes are further apart and journeys longer.

What makes it worse is that our area has been paying its way for years. Take the roads. This year Surrey expects around £39 million from the Department for Transport for road maintenance. Surrey’s Conservatives are adding more than £80 million on top, over double the Government’s share. In Hampshire, the Conservative-run county council has topped up government road funding from its own budget for more than a decade.

That money came from careful management and hard choices. Now Labour is telling residents who already contribute more than their share that they must pay more again and get less back.

Fairness should mean every community gets the support it needs, not that areas which manage their money well are made to pick up the bill for everyone else. I will keep pressing ministers to give county areas like ours a genuinely fair deal, and to stop dressing up your huge council tax rises as government generosity.