Local Government Funding

Debate between Lord Barwell and George Hollingbery

Monday 6th December 2010 Commons Chamber

[George Hollingbery]

Indeed. It is difficult to make plans at this late stage, but we have known about the cuts for some considerable time. Most councils have known for at least two or three years that the economic times are difficult. My local councils have been planning for such changes for two or three years. Frankly, it is no great excuse to say at this stage that we do not yet know the level of the settlement. We all know—and we have known for a long time—that it will be difficult.

[Gavin Barwell]

Did not the previous Government’s 2009 pre-Budget report set out clearly that public expenditure in unprotected Departments was going to fall by 25% over the course of this Parliament? Given that local government was not one of those protected areas, any local authority would therefore have been aware that such reductions were coming, whoever was in power.

[George Hollingbery]

My hon. Friend clearly demonstrates that there is no real excuse for local authorities pretending that we cannot do anything because we do not know how big the cuts will be. Straightforwardly, we know that there will be cuts, and we know that they will be serious.

There are any number of innovative third-sector partners out there doing a fantastic job. I would like to pick just one example from my local area—although it works out of the constituency of the Financial Secretary to the Treasury, my hon. Friend the Member for Fareham (Mr Hoban)—which is the You Trust. I recently met Nicola Youern, who runs the trust. The You Trust has a fantastic way of dealing with new cases, which Hampshire county council brings to it, of difficult-to-house young people. The trust first asks, “What can we teach you to do for yourself?” and then asks, “What can we teach your relatives and friends to do for you that will stop us having to intervene?” The trust goes through that sequence of trying to help people, before saying finally, “The only way we can deal with this is through a public sector intervention.” If there were more of that thinking across the public sector, we would get better results for less money.

I also welcome one or two changes that I think—I hope—will shortly appear in the localism Bill. The reporting changes are clearly very welcome. As the performance management portfolio holder for Winchester city council until recently, I was in charge of producing the statistics that we had to relay to central Government, almost none of which was used to create real change in the council but almost all of which were incredibly burdensome to collect.