Local Government Finance Bill

Debate between Lord Bichard and Lord Tope

Tuesday 16th October 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Tope]

My Lords, my name is also added to this amendment. The noble Lord, Lord Best, has introduced the amendment characteristically fully, clearly and precisely. Equally characteristically, the noble Lord, Lord Jenkin, has once again confessed to his errors of the past, but more particularly, pleaded with us eloquently to learn from experience. That is so important.

Our discussions on this part of the Bill through all its previous stages have been characterised by the number of speeches that have begun by people saying, “I don’t know anything about local government finance, but”. We will probably hear quite a number of figures quoted and quite a number of complex issues will be raised. It is a complex issue. None of us who has had a lifetime in local government will pretend that local government finance is anything but complex. But what we face today is a very simple and basic question. There is a shortfall. Many councils are facing a shortfall in having to introduce the council tax reduction scheme. Is it fair that the shortfall is met by those who can least afford it in our community, such as those on benefit? As has been explained, they will be affected even more because, quite rightly, pensioners and the most vulnerable, however defined, are excluded from this. They will face a huge disadvantage in terms of their income. Is it fairer that they should meet the shortfall or should it fall on the wider community? I think that everyone here would agree that it is fair and right that that shortfall should be met by the wider community. It is a complex issue but it is a simple question that is at the heart of the debate today.

I was a little surprised at the rather churlish response from the Opposition to the, albeit very late, announcement from the Minister on the transitional funding. I can well understand that there are many questions and difficulties about that, but I would much rather have Ministers coming forward at a late stage saying, “We have been listening and we want to try and help so this is a change”. From that point of view I welcome this move, but is it a solution? Well, £100 million is always welcome to local government. It will help but it will help for one year only. It is not a solution to the problem, as the noble Lord, Lord Best, has rightly said. It will help perhaps for one year. There are a lot of complexities. We will get further details about it later this week or, as I think I heard the Minister say, maybe next week. I hope that it will be here by Monday morning as we certainly need it in time for Third Reading. I hope that it will be this week, otherwise what will be doing next weekend?

The transitional relief will not solve the problem. The amendment, as explained very clearly by the noble Lord, Lord Best, will give local authorities the discretion—it is not a requirement—in the light of their local circumstances, priorities and demographic make-up. In all of those things it will give them the discretion to vary the single-person discount. That will be different across the country. That is the nature of localism. I said earlier that I might have preferred still to have a national scheme with universal credit, but that is not what we will have. We have a localisation of council tax. What could be more in keeping with localism than giving local authorities the discretion and the power to produce a scheme that best suits their local circumstances? That is what this would do. As the noble Lord, Lord Best, said, some may wish to put limits on that discretion. The Liberal Democrats would certainly support a limit on the 20%—no lower than 20% on the single-person discount—so there would be a variation of between 20% and 25%. That alone would solve the problem that most local authorities are facing. Some may feel that pensioners should be exempted. All that is possible but it is only possible if there is some movement and some negotiation on the issue.

One of the surprises is that the Government have thus far been unwilling to negotiate at all on the single-person discount. The Secretary of State has firmly set his mind against any change. That contrasts starkly with the Localism Bill that we spent so many happy hours on in your Lordships’ House last year when we managed to achieve 440 amendments by agreement, albeit on rather a bigger Bill than we are discussing today. Not one of those amendments needed to be carried on a vote. Therefore, I am very disappointed that this year we cannot even negotiate on finding a solution to this issue.

If this amendment is carried today, as I very much hope it will be, obviously it will go to the other place and those negotiations will have to take place before it comes back to this House. I regret that we will have to come right at the end of this to force negotiations in this way, but if that is how it has to be done then so be it. The noble Lord, Lord Best, made this point and I want to stress that this amendment and the relaxation on single-person discount is strongly supported by every political group in the Local Government Association. I stress that that includes the independent group—I am never quite sure whether it is a political group or not, but the party leaders of all four groups have signed a letter to the Secretary of State urging him to accept it. It has all-party support. Nowhere is that support stronger than in the Labour group and on the Labour councils which are facing the real pain of this. It is inexplicable to me, after a lifetime in local government, that the Labour Benches have been unwilling to sign up to this amendment or even to discuss the wording to make it more acceptable to them. That is genuinely quite inexplicable. I hope even at this late hour, having made their stand on the previous amendment, and the House having decided on it, they will reflect on that and recognise that if we can pass this amendment today we can negotiate on it when it eventually comes back to our House.

To summarise, the amendment is fair. It is a far more equitable solution to the problem that local authorities are facing. That is why every local authority of every political complexion that I know of strongly supports it. It is localist, and this is supposed to be about the localisation of council tax benefit. It trusts local authorities and gives them some discretion—perhaps limited—on how to devise the scheme to face what we are legislating for. Above all, it is practical. It can be implemented quite easily even at this late hour. Local authorities have to publish their draft scheme by the end of January although it does not come in until April. They can do that now. Councils choose to vary the single-person’s discount which will be collecting very small sums of money. The figure being quoted by the Local Government Association is 30p a week from people who are already paying council tax and who are already on record, rather than larger sums of money from people who can much less afford it and who in many cases are not paying council tax at all because their income does not justify it.

In our debate on the previous amendment, the noble Baroness, Lady Hollis, referred to a red-line moment. That was perhaps a red-line moment in an unreal world; this is the real red line. It is perhaps an appropriate colour. It is the real red line in the real world and I urge noble Lords on all sides of the House—perhaps particularly those on the Labour side of the House—to support the amendment, as I do.

[Lord Bichard]

My Lords, I support the amendment and declare an interest as a vice-president of the Local Government Association, as many of us are. I support it for two very simple reasons. First, in the light of the previous vote, this is perhaps the last opportunity to offer some help to protect the most vulnerable in our communities, who stand to suffer most from the proposed legislation if it is passed as drafted. Like the noble Lord, Lord Tope, I implore all noble Lords who I know have a passion to protect the interests of the most vulnerable in our society to support the amendment. I suggest that this is not the time for political tactics. Nor could a vote for the amendment be taken as supporting in any way the policy in the Bill. It should and would be taken as a practical way of helping those most in need when they need it most.

The second reason is that I support the cause of localism and devolution, which is after all a key priority of the coalition Government. For me, devolution always involves the devolution of power. It is not just about the devolution of responsibility or, on occasion, of the right to be blamed. The devolution of power is what the amendment moved by the noble Lord, Lord Best, offers.

Devolution is also about devolving choice, and giving local authorities the chance to make a choice about where money is spent and what their priorities are. Once again, that is what the amendment is about. It gives local authorities the chance to make a judgment, taking into account their local knowledge, about what their priorities are and where their money should be spent. For those two simple reasons I implore the House to support the amendment.

Localism Bill

Debate between Lord Bichard and Lord Tope

Monday 31st October 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bichard]

My Lords, in speaking to this group of amendments, I draw attention to my own Amendment 10. I rise mainly to pay tribute to and thank the Minister for the constructive and very helpful way in which she has entered into discussions following the amendment that I tabled on Report, together with the noble Lords, Lord Tope, Lord Newton and Lord Filkin. Unfortunately, the noble Lords, Lord Filkin and Lord Newton, for very good reasons, cannot be here tonight, but they both specifically asked me whether they could be included in the thanks for the constructive approach that has been taken.

I shall not waste the time of the House by running over the ground that the Minister has already covered. I think we now have a package that is much better as a result of all our efforts, and this is now a very important part of the infrastructure of local government. As the noble Baroness knows, simply for the sake of clarity and comprehensiveness, I would have liked to have had a specific reference in the Bill to the power to suspend from a committee. However, I am grateful to her for having referred specifically to the powers that already exist, and I think that that, too, will help to clarify the situation. Therefore, all in all, I am very grateful for the help that she has provided. I know that sometimes she has had to act in the face of considerable opposition. I shall go no further than that, but I think that we have reached a place with which I feel content and, again, to save the time of the House, that means that I shall not be moving my Amendment 10.

[Lord Tope]

My Lords, I follow my noble friend with a small “f”—the noble Lord, Lord Bichard. As he said, we moved a number of amendments at an earlier stage of the Bill and I, too, pay tribute to the Minister for listening so carefully and for taking so seriously the points that we made. The apologies of my noble friend Lord Newton have already been given, but I specifically undertook not only to give his apologies—a hospital appointment prevents his being here—but to pass on his warm thanks to the Minister. Those thanks are perhaps not so much for the extent to which she has moved but for the extent to which she has been able to move those close to her during the proceedings here.

I think that we have moved a very long way from the position that we were in in Committee, when the person replying on the Front Bench said that standards were a matter for local discretion. I am probably one of the greatest localists in your Lordships’ House, but I thought at the time, and feel very strongly now, that if there is one thing that should not be left to local discretion, it is standards in public life. We have got to the point that we have now reached because in the past there has been rather too much discretion over standards in public life.

I am very pleased that we are going to have a mandatory code—or, rather, that it is going to be mandatory to have a code—but I am a little sad that its minimum provisions are not to be the same throughout the country. I think that in reality they will be the same throughout the country, because my expectation is that the great majority of local authorities will simply keep the code that they all already have. My concern relates to what I hope will be a tiny minority of councils that decide not to keep the code that they now have, and it relates more particularly to why they make that decision and in what way they might change it. That leads me to ask the Minister whether there will be any form of monitoring, whether by her department or by the Local Government Association, so that we know what changes are happening throughout the country. There may well be some that are a cause for concern. What we do about them may be another matter, but we should at least know about them.

The noble Lord, Lord Bichard, has already told us that he will not be moving his amendment, but my other concern is that councils now have, and will retain, the power as a sanction, if necessary, either to remove councillors from certain committees or sub-committees or simply not to appoint them. Will that also apply to outside bodies, as all councils appoint councillors as their representatives on outside bodies? Will they now also be able to remove a councillor from an outside body to which the council has appointed him or her?

Many councils, including my own, also have local committees or area committees that are constituted and stated in the council’s constitution to comprise all the councillors elected for that area. Presumably there is a power now to remove them from that area committee. Is that the case, and how does that fit with the constitution of the council, which says that all councillors representing that area have a right to be on that committee?

My other concern is about the form of monitoring—I do not mean imposition, but monitoring—there will be to let us know what is happening under the new regime. I certainly am grateful to the Minister for moving us so far on this, but quite a number of us are still concerned about this issue and feel that we are not there yet—well, we are there but this is not perfection and we may well have to return to the issue in the years to come after a number of high profile cases.

My last point is to welcome the lengths to which Ministers have now moved in the appointment of an independent person and in trying to ensure as far as possible that that person is genuinely independent and open. That independent person now plays an even more important role, in effect being the right of appeal—the only appeal that a councillor has—against what he may well feel is the unfair victimisation by a council with a heavy one-party majority, whatever the party, of someone who is a thorn in the flesh but is not necessarily doing anything improper. Again, it is important that the independent person, as far as it is ever possible, is upheld to be genuinely independent.

I join others in very much paying tribute to the Minister. I know from other sources how hard she has had to work at times to persuade more reluctant colleagues of the necessity to move in this direction. I congratulate her on her persuasive powers and the success that she has achieved. As my colleague, the noble Lord, Lord Bichard, said, we do not have all that we want but we have a lot more than we thought we would get at an earlier stage in the Bill, and I am grateful for that.