Local Government Finance Bill
Debate between Lord Deben and Baroness Hollis of Heigham(12 years, 5 months ago)
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Lord Deben
My Lords, I am so often in agreement with the noble Baroness, Lady Hollis, that I hesitate to intervene, but this is entirely the wrong way round and I deeply disagree with her. This is a very important aspect of what we are doing because the problem with localism is that everyone who has ever been concerned with centralism will find on every occasion that it will be better done by those clever people at the centre. What was behind the noble Baroness’s comments was to say, “The vulnerable will be protected only if we at the centre make sure that no one has any input on this at all in case they might make a different measure and balance, given their available resources”.
I must say that I really wonder what I would say if I had been a local councillor and had heard her comments about what was likely to happen if the local council had made these decisions. The noble Baroness represented a Labour council that decided that in local terms it would bilk the Government’s policy on the sale of council houses. It said, “We have a right to do this”. My noble friend was the one who had to stop the council doing that because it was a government policy, but the council took its own view. It was against the law. It actually broke the law in order to uphold localism as it saw it.
Baroness Hollis of Heigham
My Lords, we did not break the law. I actually won the first round for judicial review. It was only when subsequently it was clear that it would cost the local authority a lot of money if we went to appeal—against Lord Denning—that I decided that we would negotiate. What then happened was that the regional officer was sent in to run the sale of council housing for us and, after six weeks—I was deposed as housing chair—he came knocking at my door saying, “Could we discuss this?” He was hidden behind a huge bouquet of flowers. I said “Of course, of course”. He said, “No one will work with me because when I’m gone, you will still be there”. I said, “Oh, dear me”. We negotiated and six weeks later, he went off to Africa as a chaplain and we went back to where we were.
Lord Deben
As we are going down memory lane, I will just remind the noble Baroness that no other local council thought what her council thought about the law. Everyone else accepted that the law was as it was, and indeed it was the law of the land. I am not blaming her for it; I was cheering her on. In those days, she did think that localism mattered, even in a matter so clearly a national policy. My problem with everything she has said is that I have heard it again and again, but normally from officials. Normally it is central government civil servants who sit there and say, “Better not, Minister. If you allow people down there to make decisions, you never know what might happen”. I would say this to her: you have got to start somewhere. Why can we not start here? After all, council tax is a local tax. It is ludicrous to say that the tax is local but the arrangements for the tax rebate should be national. I find that unacceptable and therefore I hope very much that the Ministers will not read out a concession or a helpful comment. I want the Ministers to be tough about this and say, “This is a matter for local authorities”. If local people don’t like it and think the local authority has not been generous enough or has not used the extra funds from something it is able to control—I hope that local authorities will be controlling more and more because I believe in localism—those local people have in their hands the ability to change the authority. This is exactly what has destroyed local government over the years, and my party has been as guilty of it as others. We are always frightened about giving local councillors the real decisions about things.
I do not want to go too much into the detail, but I can also argue that not all reasons for local council tax rebates are central and national. I can cite a lot of examples where the pressures and the concerns about vulnerability are different in some parts of the country from others. Rural areas have different demands with regard to vulnerability from close-knit communities. I merely say that one could go through a list of those.
I come now to the thing that really made me stand up. It was the use of the phrase “postcode lottery” by the noble Baroness. It is a Daily Mail argument that she should never use.
Lord Deben
We want postcode decisions, not a postcode lottery. We want local authorities to make their own decisions about their own communities and their own priorities. What has been wrong in this society for too long is the use of this ridiculous argument.
The noble Baroness says, “You may be on the wrong side of the line”. Well, frankly, that depends on what you think is the wrong side of the line. It may be that in a particular locality, scarce resources are used in a different way from the neighbouring locality. That does not mean to say that you are on the wrong side of the line, it means that you are on the wrong side of the line as defined by the noble Baroness. That is the trouble. Central government has always believed that defining these lines is the business of central government and never of anyone else.
When I was Secretary of State for the Environment I remember addressing a local government conference. When I said that I believed we should do nothing in Brussels that we could not do in Westminster, but what we had to do in Brussels we should do well, and we should never do anything in Westminster that we could do in county hall, but that anything we do in Westminster should be done well, I was cheered. When I went on to say that we should nothing in county hall that we could not do in district council offices, I was cheered again. But when I said that we should do nothing in district council offices that we could not do in the parish council, I was booed. Why was that? It was because everybody believes in subsidiarity—up to there. The moment you talk about subsidiarity below them, all hell breaks loose. The world will fall apart and vulnerable people will be totally stamped on—because we are the only people who know.
That was a very good example of “the man in Whitehall knows best”. It was always the purpose of centralists to claim that no one else could make decisions. I have been longing to say this about the postcode lottery and the moment has come, because it is exactly that which we are fighting against. I must say to my noble friend the Minister that, if she gives way on this, she will be taking away the fundamental element of proper localism; that is, you risk local people making decisions that are different from those that you would make. That is the challenge of localism. The noble Baroness has given us the opportunity to take the most difficult example and say, “No, here we stand”.
Baroness Hollis of Heigham
How then would the noble Lord explain why council tax benefit was originally included in universal credit and the White Paper, why all the planning assumptions were based on that and why it was only subsequently extracted in a deal between departments? How does this have anything to do with localism as a principle?
Lord Deben
It is because the Government have not gone far enough yet; that is the whole point. I would have a different structure, but the noble Baroness must not ask me to answer for the Government. I am lucky enough to be formerly a Minister and to be able to say one or two things which need to be said. I disagree with the noble Baroness, but she will find on other occasions that I am stalwart in support of some of the things that she says which this Government do not agree with. However, on this occasion, I beg my noble friend to stand firm.
Baroness Hollis of Heigham
My Lords, this is not a formality: I thank everyone who has taken part. In a way, the Committee caught alight on this, and it is good that that was on such an important issue.
The noble Baroness, Lady Browning, was right when she said that there was an issue about precepting and billing authorities, which the Minister referred to at the end: the knowledge is on one side and the billing authority is constructing the discount scheme on the other. The lesson that I suggest to the Minister that we take from that is a different one: that you should certainly consult and should have time to consult. She should therefore think again about her response and that of her colleague, the noble Earl, Lord Attlee, to my noble friend’s amendment about the ability to delay, because I assure her that it just will not be possible to get the schemes in alignment and, having done that, to move them out to public consultation all within the financial cycle, ready for introduction in April. That will not work. The Minister, as well as the noble Baroness, Lady Browning, has made our point for us in spades. I hope that as a result she will be able to review the Government's position on the amendment in due course.
I have the greatest admiration for the noble Lord, Lord Deben; on many issues we have been side by side and he was the Minister who, above all, stopped planning in local authorities being subject to the free market, a legacy bequeathed by his colleague Nicholas Ridley, a former Secretary of State for the Environment, which allowed many of us to protect our historic buildings, streets and centres. The noble Lord is in the book of the almost very good in most local authorities, and I am sure that he would want to keep that reputation intact.
No one doubts that planning is a local decision. Obviously there are inspectors and so on, but none the less it is local. However, when you have a number of elderly folk who need care and support and the local authority—rightly, in my view—makes a decision about whether it is more appropriate in its area to go for residential care or, possibly because it is a rural area, to go for extended domiciliary services, it is right and proper that one local authority should differ from another according to the geography and nature of the locality. The noble Lord and I have no differences about that; I was not in local government for 25 years to knock localism. That is why I bothered with it, as do many people in this Room today.
However, it is not a matter of centralism versus localism when you come to the individual entitlement to income. It is simply a different category. In planning, the planning authority is acting as umpire between local residents and car drivers. In residential care, it is a case of deciding how a particular type of need is best met, and many flowers may bloom. However, individual entitlement to income is a basic human right and not part of the proper territory of debate between centralism and localism. This is not about the clever people in the centre knowing best, to copy the noble Lord’s words—that really is an absurd statement—but neither do local people know best. Will the noble Lord argue equally that, because joblessness rises in a locality, unemployment benefit should be locally determined? I await his reply.
Lord Deben
Unemployment benefit does not relate to a local tax. We are talking about a local tax, and in a locality it would be sensible for a local council, for example, to say that the way to deal with child poverty in this area is to spend the money on providing the means for them to be fed because it had discovered that by doing it in another way the children did not get the food because the parents used it elsewhere. That is a perfectly reasonable thing for people to decide.
Baroness Hollis of Heigham
We could have another argument about whether to have cash or benefits in kind, but the point about income is that it is a national entitlement. We have accepted that for unemployment benefit, I think. Even though the lack of a job may arise because of the peculiar distinctiveness of the locality, we do not then say that, as a result, that should determine the level of unemployment benefit. Equally in housing, rents and policy are determined locally. Is the noble Baroness going to argue that housing benefit should also be a local benefit as opposed to a national one? I do not think so. The main argument that he has used is that because council tax is levied locally, council tax benefit should be structured locally. That takes no account of the fact that half the country is in two-tier authorities where they have no control over what the precepting authority may levy on the billing authority, yet the billing authority takes the problem, cost and moral responsibility for the discount scheme that runs. As a former MP for an area with a rural district council in Suffolk, the noble Lord will know that as well as anyone. His argument does not run in two-tier authorities—it cannot, because the council tax is not generated by the billing authority that is constructing the discount scheme, and any toughness in the scheme to impress on people what their value for money is does not relate to that particular billing authority.
Lord Deben
They do have control over it—they have an election. If they do not like what the county council has done they can vote against it. If the noble Baroness is really saying that the only system that people can understand is a single-tier system, she is making a mistake that is very much wider than this. Many people know which do what, and, if they do not like what one of them does, they vote against them in the local election, as we all know.