Social Care (Liverpool)

Debate between George Howarth and Maria Eagle

Tuesday 7th March 2017 Westminster Hall

[Maria Eagle (Garston and Halewood) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Hollobone.

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Liverpool, Riverside (Mrs Ellman) on obtaining this crucial and timely debate. She set out in full and with great clarity the situation facing Liverpool and other local authorities in the city region, as the council seeks to set a lawful budget while desperately trying to keep going the public services on which so many of our constituents depend. She set out in great detail and with pertinent facts and figures many of the things that I was going to say about Liverpool. I endorse her speech fully—it was excellent.

Liverpool has had £420 million cut from the city budget since the Lib Dem-Tory coalition imposed cuts in 2010. There has also been the never-ending slashing of public services provision by this Government and their predecessor, and another £90 million has to be found. To illustrate that, Liverpool raised £147 million in council tax in the last financial year, but it spent £151 million on adult social care. I will emphasise that: Liverpool is having to spend more on adult social care alone than it can raise in council tax.

My hon. Friend set out some of the other concerns and problems. The demand for social care assessments is rising. Despite the cuts she described to the money that can be spent on adult social care, the demand for help of those depleted services from our citizens and constituents has increased by 15%. The demand for social care assessments in Liverpool has gone up from 18,000 a year in 2020 to 21,000 a year now. As she set out, Liverpool supports 9,000 people annually to some degree with a care package at home. That is fewer than half of the people who have asked to be assessed, so it is clear that only those with the highest needs get help, and they may well not get a level of support from which they benefit and which might keep them out of more acute services for longer with a better quality of life.

Liverpool City Council announced in its budget proposal that it intends to increase council tax. It will of course do so reluctantly, because many of our fellow citizens will find it difficult to afford an increase, but that course of action must be taken. I say in all sincerity to the Minister that it is not credible to claim that the shortfall that results from resources being cut by 70% can be made up by efficiency savings. I could not lose 70% of my resources and make up the difference in efficiency savings.

My constituency of Garston and Halewood also covers part of the Knowsley metropolitan borough, which is a smaller authority but, thanks to this Government and the Lib Dem-Tory coalition Government that preceded it, it faces financial challenges that are just as severe. Its revenue is currently £148 million. It has had to make cuts of £86 million since 2010 and will have to find a further £17 million over the next three years. That is a total loss for a small authority of more than £100 million. Both Liverpool and Knowsley are among the top five hardest hit local authorities. Knowsley’s income will have gone down by 56% by the end of this process.

Knowsley raised £43.2 million in council tax in the last financial year, yet it spent £47.1 million on adult social care alone. Are we seeing a pattern here? Just like Liverpool, Knowsley had to spend more on adult social care alone than it was able to raise in council tax this year. The pressures on the social care budget are huge. Because the population is ageing and people are living for longer—something we should all celebrate—Knowsley expects to face additional pressures of £10 million in the next three years for adult social care alone.

[Mr George Howarth (Knowsley) (Lab)]

Does my hon. Friend agree that the picture she paints is grim, particularly for Knowsley? Does she, like me, envisage a time in the not-too-distant future when Knowsley simply will not be able to meet its legal responsibilities unless additional funds are found to ensure that adult social care is available?

[Maria Eagle]

I well understand my right hon. Friend’s concerns. Indeed, the fear is that it will simply be impossible. Knowsley has not had 56% of its statutory obligations removed—just 56% of the money with which it is supposed to meet them. Knowsley, too, is looking at a council tax increase of 4.99%, with 3% ring-fenced for adult social care. This will be the first time that it has increased council tax in five years, and it will do so reluctantly, but that will generate just £1.9 million a year—a total of £3.8 million over the three-year period. That will pay for only just over a third of the pressures that are expected in adult social care alone.

Some additional money will come through the improved better care fund, and there will be one-off allocations—albeit of less than £1 million—through the adult social care fund, but none of that will meet the pressures that are apparent now. I say again to the Minister in all sincerity that one-off payments cannot deal with permanent pressures that are increasing relentlessly day by day when budgets have been cut so drastically.

Unfortunately, Government actions elsewhere mean that those pressures could easily increase rather than decrease because of what is happing in the health service, as my hon. Friend the Member for Liverpool, Riverside mentioned. Greater pressures on our NHS hospitals and acute services, which have financial problems, the Government’s never-ending austerity mania and real-terms reductions in resources for the NHS over the next few years mean that our NHS services, too, are under enormous pressure. That is where the Merseyside and Cheshire sustainability and transformation plan comes in, but that aims to offset £908 million of financial pressures on the local NHS. It has changed from something that was welcome as a way of improving co-operation and transforming our services into something that is simply about saving money over the next few years. I am afraid that that will not make things easier.

There has been a lack of consultation between the STP leaders and the councils. Neither of the councils that I have mentioned feels like they have been consulted at all about the proposals that are supposed to be going ahead for the NHS, despite the fact that they will face pressure from hospitals that want to get people back into the community—but to what? There is ever-decreasing resource in the community to help look after them.

Tomorrow’s Budget is a chance for the Chancellor to tackle some of those problems with vigour. We hope that he will, but if the Government’s briefing in the newspapers is to be believed, it looks like he will not. It is reported that he will announce an emergency fund of £1.3 billion to tackle the social care crisis. That is only half of the £2.6 billion that the Local Government Association estimates the spending gap will reach by 2020, and it appears that the Chancellor will direct it at schemes that aim to tackle bed-blocking. Knowsley will not benefit from such money, because it has tackled that problem already. Indeed, the Minister always prays Knowsley in aid when he tries to say that bed-blocking is not a problem in some authorities. Knowsley has lost 56% of its resource, and it now looks like it will be punished for being efficient while less efficient local authorities get a slice of the money that the Chancellor will give out tomorrow.

Apparently, the Chancellor will also establish another long-term review of social care funding. Although that is welcome, because this needs to be tackled in the end as a proper long-term policy issue, it will not tackle the problems that Liverpool and Knowsley face now. I must also observe that both Governments the Minister has been a member of have done the same, and they simply ignored the proposals that ended up emerging. The shadow Cabinet of which he was a prominent member before 2010 sabotaged the attempts by my right hon. Friend the Member for Leigh (Andy Burnham) to have cross-party talks about a solution seven years ago for a cheap election poster alleging that Labour was proposing a death tax. So we will see.

Meanwhile, the social care crisis in Liverpool and Knowsley worsens and the Government simply pass the buck, play politics and offer zero leadership—I am afraid we have come to expect that from them. Those who lose out are the elderly and the vulnerable, who rely most on the services that this Government’s actions decimate the most.

Defibrillators in Public Areas

Debate between George Howarth and Maria Eagle

Monday 16th January 2017 Commons Chamber

[Maria Eagle]

I congratulate the hon. Lady on bringing forward her Bill. Yes, it was done under the 10-minute rule procedure, but it is now there, and I echo her call for the Government to adopt it. As she realistically observed, the only reason it may not progress in this Session is that there is no time given its position on the list for private Member’s Bill Fridays. The Government could transform that in an instant by taking on board aspects of the Bill—or the whole Bill, preferably—and putting them into some of their own legislation. The Minister might have something to say about that.

[Mr George Howarth (Knowsley) (Lab)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend on the eloquent and forceful speech she is making. She has already paid tribute to the King family. May I add my tribute to them for their great dignity and the constructive way in which they have taken the issue forward? I agree with the hon. Member for Lewes (Maria Caulfield) that the ten-minute rule Bill has virtually no chance of getting on to the statute book, but the Government could, if they had a mind to, adopt it and turn it into a Government Bill. Of course, if it is defective in any way, it could be amended, but nevertheless the spirit of it could be carried forward.

Education: Knowsley

Debate between George Howarth and Maria Eagle

Tuesday 13th December 2016 Westminster Hall

[Maria Eagle (Garston and Halewood) (Lab)]

Does my hon. Friend agree that for a borough such as Knowsley, which has a substantial population, the idea of having no academic A-level provision is embarrassing for all the schools and education institutes? It does not bode well for the future of the borough if our young people cannot get the education they need—of whatever variety—in the place that they live.

[Mr Howarth]

My hon. Friend puts that very well. I agree with her entirely and was just going on to add a word about the impact of the negative publicity and comment.

Before setting out some ideas that I believe will help improve secondary education, I want to note some positive things that are already happening. Hard-working heads and teachers are understandably demoralised at the continual denigration that they experience in the media and from the Government; parents and school students are understandably upset that their hard work and achievements are continually rubbished. Yet there is so much good work going on that never gets a mention.

Ten days ago, for example, I visited the Lord Derby Academy, part of the Dean Trust, and met head of school Vicky Gowan and assistant headteacher, Josette Arnold. On a tour of the school, it was obvious that they were doing a lot right. The sense of discipline and the rigorous approach to teaching were obvious and commendable, and promise to bring about big improvements. Much the same could be said for the other secondary schools in Knowsley. Similarly, I recently had the privilege of opening the new Northern Logistics Academy in Kirkby, a joint undertaking between St Helens College and Knowsley Community College. It provides logistics training for those seeking to work in that industry, which is a real growth industry in our city region.

Knowsley Council, having disowned the ResPublica report, has now established an education commission, chaired by Christine Gilbert, previously chief inspector of schools in England and head of Ofsted, and supported by other distinguished commissioners, which is charged with producing an improvement plan. That approach should be supported and I would ask the Minister to commit the Government to that. It is worth noting that the commission has the potential to signpost ways in which other deprived areas such as Knowsley can also make appropriate improvements.

Two developments which could lift achievement are the Shakespeare North and Bio-Inspire projects. Both implicitly offer opportunities to raise aspiration for school students in Knowsley, and I hope that the Government will continue to support both initiatives.

If we are to improve social mobility in areas such as Knowsley, the single most powerful engine for doing so is education. That being so, and given Knowsley’s high level of deprivation, it came as a surprise that Knowsley was not one of the six opportunity areas recently announced by the Government. I feel that the methodology used to identify those areas was flawed. Will the Minister undertake to review the methodology? Will she undertake to look at how Knowsley could be included in any further strategies to improve social mobility?

I want to make a suggestion about how educational attainment could be improved. Before doing so, I should say a word about how attainment is measured. Attainment 8 measures a student’s average grade across eight subjects, which are the same subjects that count for progress 8. Those new metrics are a significant change to education reporting; performance measurement is spread across a wider range of subjects and is no longer based solely on attainment, and there is an emphasis on progress.

Knowsley ranks bottom in the north-west, with an overall attainment 8 score of 39, compared with Liverpool on 47 and Trafford, which is top, on 57. It also has the worst progress 8 score in the north-west, with a score of minus 0.88 compared with Liverpool on minus 0.35. Those figures illustrate the scale of the challenge in Knowsley.

I expect that the commission established by Knowsley Council will look at how post-14 education could be radically reorganised. There is, in my view, a case to be made for creating a choice post-14, but not through a grammar school. Many students in their later years do not regard the sort of education on offer as suited to their future aspirations. Sir Michael Wilshaw has, on a number of occasions, called for a skills revolution in the UK, arguing that every multi-academy trust should run a vocational university technology college for youngsters aged 14 to 19. He said:

“We need to say to youngsters, ‘there are other paths than university’. If you’re going to make a success of Brexit, this should be the number one priority of government. Not grammar schools ... Otherwise we won’t have the skills. And the prospects for growth in the economy and productivity in the economy will suffer.”

[Maria Eagle]

Does my right hon. Friend accept that Halewood Academy closed its sixth form not because it no longer wished to teach A-levels but because, and I do not blame the head and the governors for their decision, financially it is obliged to balance its budget and it simply no longer had enough pupils wanting to go into the sixth form—for various reasons—to enable it financially to continue? As a consequence, there is now no academic A-level provision in the entire borough. Does my right hon. Friend agree that it is commendable that Knowsley, which has no longer has any levers to provide education in its own borough and gets blamed when it goes wrong, has done what it can in establishing the commission? We hope that the Government will do what they can, in supporting that process, for all the young people and families in Knowsley.

[Mr Howarth]

I agree entirely with my hon. Friend. She is right to point out the limited scope of Knowsley Council, which is the local authority that has suffered the greatest cuts in the country while also being among those with the highest need. As I said earlier—it is an extension of my hon. Friend’s point—it is no longer viable to offer sixth-form provision in Knowsley, and if we do not do something urgently it will become unviable to offer any kind of secondary education at all. I agree with my hon. Friend, and I also agree with Sir Michael Wilshaw.

In many cases it would be more effective if the opportunity for vocational education were available post-14, offering pupils a programme of GCSEs, technical and professional qualifications and work experience. That is not to say that those who aspire to a more academic education should not have that choice but, rather, that it should be a choice and not the only option.

Time does not allow me to give a detailed account of how such a reorganisation would need to be carried out. Who would offer the more vocational post-14 option and could the existing secondary system be adapted to provide the more academic option? Those are examples of tough questions that need to be worked through. It is also essential that the vocational and technical education courses on offer are of a high quality and of equal status to the conventional curriculum.

I should perhaps declare an interest at this point. I was one of the generation who left secondary school at 15 but went to technical college. I studied engineering and then went on to do an engineering apprenticeship. Later, in my 20s, I did a degree. Those were options I had, and options I could take, and my worry is that such options are no longer available for young people, other than through the apprenticeship system. The problem with some apprenticeships is that they are too narrowly focused on the needs of the employer and, therefore, the young people who go through them do not acquire the transferable skills that might be needed when they are ready to move on to another employer. Post-14 opportunities in vocational education offer the prospect of their gaining those skills.

I am clear, as is Knowsley Council and my hon. Friend the Member for Garston and Halewood, that improvement is essential, and that a great deal of responsibility sits on the shoulders of the commissioners to come up with a way forward. Again, I ask the Minister to endorse that approach. Finally, it is important to point out that I have first-hand knowledge that young people in Knowsley are no less capable and no less ambitious than young people from better-off families. They deserve the same opportunities as young people from other parts of the country and from more prosperous areas. I hope that the Government will work with Knowsley Council, the commission, my hon. Friends the Members for Garston and Halewood and for St Helens South and Whiston, and me to ensure that that is exactly what happens.