Local Government Finance Bill

Debate between Lord Deben and Lord Beecham

Monday 16th July 2012 Grand Committee

[Lord Deben]

My Lords, I rise to say a word or two about the disablement issues; that is why I have come for this part of the Committee. It seems to me that we have not covered the point properly. We have talked about the lack of thinking in the round, but we have not talked about the fact that it becomes more important given the circumstances that we are in at the moment. My 35 years as a Member of Parliament led me to have some pretty grave doubts about some of the claims that people made. You had only to sit in your surgery to see with what tiredness they came in and with what alacrity they left, complaining about some illness or other in the mean time. It was one of those sad things and it was a real problem. The Government—perfectly rightly, in my view—have approached that, and in doing so they have reminded lots of people that some people have claimed invalidity or impairment of one sort or another improperly. The difficulty with that is that it is necessary to put things right, but that creates an atmosphere that can be extremely deleterious to people who genuinely are disabled or in real need of help.

The points that have been raised on both sides of this Committee are very important at this time in particular. It is extremely important to get the balance right and to remind people, particularly local authorities—and some still do need reminding—of the very considerable difficulties in which many disabled people live and the need for them to treat these issues with a degree of sensitivity that I am not sure is found universally. I want to look at that background just for one moment.

Secondly—and I address my noble friend the Minister very carefully—it really is time that the Government got out of their problem; and it is genuinely a problem of all Governments. After all, the Government are telling everybody, rightly, that we should have joined-up thinking. We have pathfinder operations to try to get people to have joined-up thinking about property locally, local councils and government property and to try to get various organisations to work out their problems together. So we have a Government very keen on reminding people about this, and yet they still have not dealt with the central issue that we still have silos when it comes to this kind of issue.

I am interested in the comment that we all have to look to the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, the Institute for Fiscal Studies and others—it is hoped before but certainly afterwards—to see the real impact. The question that I really want to ask my noble friend is: will he take back to the Government, in his own inimitable way, the request that it is about time that they learnt from these outside bodies? Why have we had this kind of discussion for as long as I can remember in politics, both here and in the other place? There is nothing new about this. It has always been true.

Why is it so hard for Governments ever to learn a lesson such as this? I remember the difficulty when I was Secretary of State for the Environment of trying to get government offices to have all their area offices and headquarters of other offices in the same town so that you could actually get a job done. You often used to have to go to five different towns to make any kind of decision, and then you would discover that the area covered by each department was different, as far as that region was concerned. We got over one or two of the more extreme cases, but the thing that really worries me is that the conversation that we have just had—which, after all, has been most amicable and agreed on both sides—is one that we have had too often.

I wonder whether this Committee might be the one in which we could say enough is enough and that this is a matter for governments seriously to deal with. Otherwise, it does not matter who is on which side. We will go on having this discussion. If it is not about disability, it will be about something else where as similar problem arises—where the Department of Health, the Department for Work and Pensions, the department responsible for local government and everyone else have not really got together to see how their various concerns impact on particular individuals.

This is the effort of a long-time Member of Parliament and a very long-serving Minister to say that having failed myself, and being honest about that, do you think that we could on this occasion bring it home to someone who is very much above the pay grade of anyone in this Committee? This is something that the Government have to take seriously. It is very boring, constantly, to have this conversation, with good-hearted people on both sides of the House saying the same things and, in the end, knowing very well that it will not have the effect that we really want.

[Lord Beecham]

My Lords, this has been an interesting debate with some extremely perceptive contributions. I very much welcome the contribution of the noble Lord, Lord Deben. He and I occasionally crossed swords during his tenure at the Department of the Environment, as it then was, but he was right to say that we need a balance in the view of claimants that is so often the focus of public debate in the media and, sometimes, by politicians. There are always some who abuse the system, but they are not by any means in the majority. There are many people who do not claim who should claim, whether it is for disability or other things. That reference to balance is highly desirable.

However, I am slightly nervous about his reference to government offices because there certainly was a problem and the Government have certainly solved it—they have closed them. There are now no government offices for people in the regions to go to. It has all been centralised. However, his fundamental point is right. The Government need and have failed, so far as one can judge in connection with the Bill, to look across departmental interests and the client groups that may be represented by various government departments.

It is interesting that there is no specific mention of disability or any other particular category in the impact analysis, although it is a significant element in the Bill, the Government illustrate only the impact on pensioners and other age groups. The analysis does not refer at all to disability as a specific issue and yet, as we heard from the brilliant forensic analysis by my noble friend Lady Lister, there is a huge problem that affects a variety of people with different disabilities and conditions, and of course their carers, which clearly must be taken into account.

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[Lord Beecham]

My Lords, we have had a longer and more entertaining debate than many of us thought we would have. We had the Browning versions, two of them, and we have had an interesting conflict between Norfolk and Suffolk. I hesitate to arbitrate between those two counties. In relation to the remarks by the noble Lord, Lord Deben, from time to time, I have been tempted to form a society for the preservation of the postcode lottery. In some areas of policy, it is absolutely the right line to take. We have had too much regimentation and prescription nationally about what should and should not be done.

However, we are not talking about policies here but about the people’s basic right to a minimum income. To take the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Deben, to its logical conclusion, we would have differential benefits across the piece. We would have different benefits for disabled people, pensions, child benefit and whatever up and down the country, determined locally. The noble Lord shakes his head, but where is the difference? The difference that he advances is that council tax is raised locally, but that is an irrelevance to the person looking at his disposable income that he has to deploy in support of his family. Where the localism part should come in—not the faux localism of the Poor Law—is that you would have a national basic minimum entitlement which, if the local authority thought it right, you could increase and enhance benefits. That would seem to be a reasonable application of localism because everybody is guaranteed a national minimum and locally the community may decide to augment it but, in our view, it should not be in a position to reduce it.

One of my noble friends, or perhaps the noble Baroness, Lady Browning, referred to Localising Support for Council Tax Vulnerable People. Paragraph 3.4, about equality information and engagement, states in connection with child poverty that:

“authorities will be required to take into account their local child poverty needs assessment”.

That is fine.

“Local authorities should be able to design localised council tax reduction schemes in a way that best suits local circumstances, tailored to what child poverty looks like”—

looks like—

“in the local area”.

I will tell you what child poverty looks like in any area. It is the undernourished child going to school, perhaps dependent on free school meals. These days, he may have to go to a breakfast club to get a breakfast. According to a recent survey, 50% of teachers are going into schools with food that they can distribute to the children. Child poverty is children going badly clothed, living in fuel poverty so the house is cold, and perhaps with dysfunctional families, although that is, of course, not simply a financial matter. This can occur anywhere. These children can be found in the city that the noble Lord, Lord Shipley, and I have represented and led and in the city that the noble Lord, Lord Smith, still leads. They can be found in villages in Suffolk, I guess, and in Norfolk, and in Kensington and Chelsea for that matter. They can be found anywhere. As my noble friend said, it is not locality that determines the character of poverty. It may possibly exacerbate a basic condition of poverty, but locality is not the determining condition, and it should not be locality that determines the basic support given to children in poverty or, indeed, to any other vulnerable group. To say that this is somehow an issue of localism is to pervert the proper definition of localism. The noble Lord has advanced a weak argument—from the best of motives because, in policy generally, he has a strong point. But in this area it is entirely misconceived.

[Lord Deben]

Let us take child poverty of the kind that the noble Lord described which is certainly true in some of our villages in Suffolk. It is up to the local authority to decide whether it is going to spend its resources making sure that those children all have a hot meal and all have breakfast rather than by having a special element in the council tax arrangements to deal with that. If the noble Lord feels that there is not enough elbow room for local authorities, I wish he would listen to his noble friend’s comments, because it seems to me that we should be pushing for many more opportunities for local people to have the resources to do the things that matter. How you deal with poverty in very distant rural areas is very different from the way in which you deal with it in Limehouse.

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[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.

[Lord Beecham]

Does my noble friend agree that although there is a significant reduction in the amount of central government support for the benefit, it is still approximately 90% government funded? So it is going towards a council tax, but the funding is still essentially central. Unfortunately, some more of it will fall on the locality as a result of what the Government are doing, but the greater part is still centrally funded.