Somerset Council: Funding and Governance

(Limited Text - Ministerial Extracts only)

Tuesday 30th January 2024 Westminster Hall

[Mr Ian Liddell-Grainger (Bridgwater and West Somerset) (Con)]

I always find—my hon. Friend the Member for Yeovil (Mr Fysh), the Minister and you, Mr Pritchard, all know this—that the best speeches in this place are the ones that you write yourself, and not the ones you deliver in parrot fashion after they have been written by someone else.

As my hon. Friend said, in the last few months we have worked together to try to solve this problem. Let us look back at the history of the situation. I will gently say that it was going on under the coalition Government. We made representations then and I do not remember being completely supported by David Laws, David Heath, Tessa Munt or—I have forgotten now, but I think that is about it. That is a problem.

It is easy to cast aspersions, but let us look at the reality. I am very grateful to the Minister; I must give credit where credit is due. He has worked very hard to make sure that he gives the time that is needed to all these councils to get this situation sorted. The point was made that £5 million is very little. Yes, of course it is, but it is a start.

I do not think it is any secret that tomorrow the Minister is meeting the leader of Somerset Council, Bill Revans, and his team to talk about the next phase. My conversations with the Minister—I do not know how many there have been, but there have been an awful lot—have always been constructive and helpful. We are in a crisis—we must be absolutely frank about that.

I absolutely abhor having in commissioners. Having suffered that, as I said in my intervention on my hon. Friend the Member for Yeovil, who was very noble about it, I know it is an absolute disaster. If they come in to Somerset, I can tell hon. Members exactly what will happen. They will shut the recycling centres, stop the buses and pull back on the funding for roads, for the most vulnerable and for many others, and the money we give to colleges such as Yeovil, Bridgwater & Taunton, and Strode just will not happen. No matter what we do—parliamentarians, councillors or anyone else; parishes, towns or whatever—it will make no difference at all.

The problem we have is that councils such as Taunton, I think Yeovil, Minehead and others are raising council taxes way out of proportion with what they need to do. I am worried that they will raise them so high to take on services that the county has been running up to now, and they will not be able to cope. In all my 23 years in this place, I have seen when councils have taken on assets, and after a while they just cannot cope. That is partly down to the people they have, partly down to the rises in costs that we all have, and partly down to the fact that these things are damned complicated, and that goes not just go for the loos, but for much more.

We really must talk with the Minister about how we make sure that when assets are given to other councils—mainly town councils, because it is more difficult to do for parishes—they are able to deal with those assets in the future. Taunton is to have a 200% increase in council tax, and that is huge, but it wants to take on a lot of things, and Taunton covers the whole of Taunton—not a bit of it, but the whole thing. I am not going to cast aspersions about whether this is right or wrong; I am just making the point that the assets that go over to such councils still have to be managed.

The other issue I have is about the superb colleges we have, and my hon. Friend the Member for Yeovil and I have talked about Yeovil College, and Bridgwater & Taunton College. We have come an enormous way in Bridgwater, and these colleges are superb. When I first came in all those years ago—and let us be honest—they were not as good as they are now. There has been a huge amount of work by the teams in both those colleges, and we have created proper colleges for Somerset. The debate goes on, and the conversations between Bridgwater & Taunton, Strode and Yeovil are brilliant. They are really looking at how we move on in the future.

Another point, and the Minister must be aware of this, is that not only are we building the biggest infrastructure project in Europe, which is Hinkley Point, but we are about to start building the Gravity site. Again, my hon. Friend the Member for Yeovil has been very helpful, with his wonderful workforce at Westland and so on. This is a 423 acre, 11 million square foot battery factory for Jaguar Land Rover under the Tata Group. It is a phenomenal investment in the west country, with 9,500 jobs, and it is crucial to the future of our beautiful county.

In the time I have left as an MP—God willing, and the electorate willing, I will still be an MP, but not for Bridgwater—I will be absolutely dedicated to getting this to the stage where we have the infrastructure, but we need a functioning council. We have to have that. It is going to be difficult for the council, because it has to put in some money, and we will have massive infrastructure costs. I do not want to have to come back to the Government in however long it is—in the next six months —and say, “Look, we haven’t got the money to put in the roads, the railway and the college campuses for Bridgwater & Taunton and for Yeovil.” We must get this sorted.

In the short time I have left, I say to the Minister that this is going to be a partnership. As I have said, I have worked with Bill Revans for a very long time, and I have enormous respect for him. He is trooping on, and not perhaps in the best circumstances, as we all know. He is still there fighting his corner, as he has long done—he stood against Tom King in 1992. He is a long-term, committed politician for whom I have a great deal of respect; as hon. Members know, that is not always the case.

We have to work together to get the funding we need to stabilise the situation, and this cannot wait until after the election. I have no idea about the policy of the Labour party—I genuinely do not know—but I know the hon. Member for Oldham West and Royton (Jim McMahon) will be sympathetic because I was in opposition when I came in and I will probably be in opposition when I go out. However, when I had issues when Tony Blair was Prime Minister, they were listened to, and I can only say that I am very grateful for everything, but we need to do this now, Prime Minister—

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities (Simon Hoare)]

I am not the Prime Minister.

[Mr Liddell-Grainger]

Yes, I know. I do apologise. Minister, we need to sort this now, and that conversation is crucial. We need to keep this going as much as we can. We need to take it forward in the constructive way in which it has been dealt with so far. I am one of the worst offenders in this place for taking it to the lowest common denominator and attacking everybody, but this is a time when we cannot do that. There are too many vulnerable people whose futures and wellbeing are at stake, so I say to the Minister: please, just keep talking to us.

Minister, you have been brilliant. I cannot fault you or the Secretary of State. I cannot fault the way in which you have dealt with Bill and his team, Duncan Sharkey and everybody in Somerset. At every meeting I have had, we have talked about how we have work to do, and we will do it. We have discussed what needs to be done. I am conveying that to Bill, the Minister will convey that tomorrow, and we will work on it. In the next few months we have to come up with a formula that safeguards those vulnerable people. My constituency covers Exmoor. The problems we face with things like social mobility and access in one of the most rural parts of England will be devastating if we cannot come to an agreement.

Minister, we are here to do the best for our constituents; we always have been. That is why you do it, why I do it, why my hon. Friend the Member for Yeovil does it, and why everyone else does it. If you can come halfway, we can come the other half. That will be most important. You could use Somerset as a guinea pig in order to come up with a formula that will get this working, so that we can work with you and land what we need to do. I am meeting the Chancellor tomorrow. I am going to put the plea to him and ask him to be generous—

--- Later in debate ---

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities (Simon Hoare)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship this evening, Mr Pritchard, and to reply to the debate initiated by my hon. Friend the Member for Yeovil (Mr Fysh). We have covered a lot of ground. The danger of covering a lot of ground is that it leaves the Minister with precious little time to respond to that ground, so I shall canter through as quickly as I can, with some barely connected bullet points.

I am grateful for the comments made by those who participated in this afternoon’s debate. My hon. Friend the Member for Yeovil said that we all want to see top-quality services for our communities. My take, and I say this as a party politician, is that the public out there do not really care what type of council is delivering the service. When push comes to shove, they are not that motivated by which party, if any, is doing it either. They just want to know that the services are there when they need them and that the council can deliver those services with resilience and robustness.

In response to the point made by my friend the shadow Minister, the hon. Member for Oldham West and Royton (Jim McMahon), I would gently remind him that in broad terms the funding of local government formula today is that which we inherited, authored and written by his party when in government. I think we all recognise that the formula needs change. Certainly, as late as last week, the Government committed to a fundamental review in the next Parliament. I am tempted to say that it would have been done had it not been for covid, which took up significant bandwidth within local government, but it is a job that needs to be done.

My hon. Friends the Members for Bridgwater and West Somerset (Mr Liddell-Grainger) and for Yeovil, and the hon. Member for Somerton and Frome (Sarah Dyke), are right to point out that there is a clear role for local government, not just in delivering statutory service, but in making place and effecting beneficial change. My hon. Friends were right to point to the excellent Yeovil College. About 40% of the students of Yeovil College come from my constituency and that of my hon. Friend the Member for West Dorset (Chris Loder). The principal, Mark Bolton, provides exemplary leadership. My hon. Friends spoke of Bridgwater & Taunton College, about which I am afraid I do not know, but if it is half as good as Yeovil College, it is excellent.

My hon. Friend the Member for Yeovil talked about the role of trying to attract business and he is absolutely right, because business rates help to grow the services. If he thinks of Leonardo and Yeovil College in his own constituency, the giga-factory investment not far from Bridgwater that my hon. Friend the Member for Bridgwater and West Somerset spoke about, and the massive investment in Hinkley Point C, I would suggest that Somerset as a rural county is very much punching above its weight in economic activity. That is to be applauded, and the role of Somerset Council in helping to foster that environment is to be noted and the council congratulated.

What is the basic problem that Somerset faces? The hon. Member for Somerton and Frome talked about money. She said that the Government were not listening. I take issue with her; I do not like taking issue in normal circumstances with the hon. Lady, but I am going to in this case. She said that we need a Government who will listen. I can give the hon. Lady half a billion pounds of listening, which we announced last week. The rural services delivery grant will now stand at its highest-ever level. We are raising the funding floor from 3% to 4%—an ask of the district councils. We have listened.

Part of the underpinning of Somerset going unitary was to deliver efficiencies and savings. For reasons that my officials and I continue to explore and doubtless will touch on in conversations tomorrow, those savings have not manifested themselves. The steam has fallen out of the engine of change. I appreciate any new party coming into an administration will want at least to cast a casual eye over a plan, but to have delayed and prevaricated for as long as it has is, in my judgment, inexcusable because the basic premise of going unitary will have been submitted. The programme of savings and efficiencies will have been looked at by officials in my Department and have been a key part in determining whether Somerset was to go unitary. A very clear and compelling case was put forward.

I know from my experience of when I did it with our colleagues in Dorset, including my right hon. Friend, the former Member for West Dorset, Sir Oliver Letwin, the numbers that we put in were gone over with a fine-tooth comb because there is no point delivering change if there is no tangible and obvious benefit. I urge Somerset Council to build up that head of steam, to put some wind in the sails—I am mixing my metaphors; not unusual for me—and to drive forward the efficiency, innovation and modernisation that underpins the unitary process.

I am not going to comment—I know colleagues have invited me to do so—on the minutiae of the conversations that officials and I are having with Somerset Council. I know that the House would not expect me to do so, but the points I am making in this debate are ones that I have and will continue to make. Somerset’s budget is up 6%—£565.3 million in ’24-’25. There are no cuts anywhere in local government budgets for this coming financial year. We are a Government who have listened. We asked, we heard.

A section 114 notice is often referred to as bankruptcy. It is not bankruptcy in the commercial sense of the term. That is the key message from me. This is not bankruptcy. No Government would ever allow any council to fall over, not because of politics or politicking, but because the vulnerable who need services need to have the comfort and security that those services will be provided. I do not want to scare the most vulnerable in our society and have them suddenly think that at the stroke of a pen and the issuing of a section 114 notice, everything they rely on for their quality of life will suddenly be removed. That would not be the case.

Mention has been made of the levelling-up agenda, which falls within the portfolio of my hon. Friend the Member for Redcar (Jacob Young). My hon. Friends the Members for Yeovil and for Bridgwater and West Somerset are right to make the point that the levelling-up agenda is not reserved solely to our northern and industrial towns, as important as they are to the levelling-up agenda. There is an element of coastal levelling up. There is an element of rural levelling up.

The hon. Member for Somerton and Frome made a point that I have made in every speech in this place since my hon. Friend the Member for Yeovil and I were first elected way back in 2015—with all we have gone through, it feels a lot longer, I am sure he will agree. The hon. Member for Somerton and Frome was right: the cost of delivery of services in a rural area, which is wider in geography and sparser in population, is by definition going to be higher than in denser urban populations. We do not then move forward and rob Peter to pay Paul and say that the deprivation in a rural area is more important than the deprivation in an urban area, or that need is greater in an urban area compared with a rural area.

Need is need. Deprivation is deprivation. We must meet the two where they manifest themselves in order to make the lives of our fellow citizens better and more comfortable. I am not a Minister who believes in robbing the rurals to pay the urbans or vice versa. I believe in trying to get equity in the system and having a more sophisticated way of recognising and addressing need. I have every confidence that in a review of the formula that would be an absolute kernel of all that we do.

The hon. Member for Oldham West and Royton referenced the audit issue, and he was right to do so. It is a serious issue. There are some announcements on that in the not-too-distant future, which I will, of course, share with him in due course through the usual channels. In conclusion, let me say this to the three representatives of the great county of Somerset—not as great as Dorset, I hasten to add. From the Blackmore hills, nothing gives me greater pleasure than to look down on Somerset, but it is a great county. It is full of innovation and good people working hard and paying their taxes. I do not believe that they should be overburdened with taxation to mask deficiencies in the public sector. I think that is something that resonates across this Chamber—indeed, I see the hon. Member for Somerton and Frome nodding in agreement.

A number of Members spoke about the importance of partnership. The central theme since I was appointed in November has been the pivotal, positive partnership between central and local government to achieve for our people, wherever they are and whatever their needs. My door stands open to work with colleagues across the House representing Somerset to ensure that their residents secure the services that they need at a good value-for-money rate. I expect Somerset Council to rise to that challenge, and I look forward to furthering my discussions with it in due course.