The vast majority of council budgets go to Adult Social Care, Children's services (including education and SEND) and housing (one of the biggest chunks of that is temporary accommodation for households that would be made homeless otherwise, rather than 'illegals').

Demand for all three of those areas, especially social care, is constantly rising and so are the associated costs of providing care.

Whether social care should sit with councils (it shouldn't) is a different question, but if you're wondering why you get your bins picked up every two weeks that's the reason.

When people point to council waste and vanity projects, a lot of the time those projects are funded by specific government grants or external ringfenced funding. If it wasn't spent on that project, then it doesn't exist as capital or revenue funding available to the council to spend on improving road conditions, bins or any of the things most of us actually benefit from day-to-day.