Spending Round 2019

Lord Greaves Excerpts

Wednesday 25th September 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Greaves (LD)]

My Lords, I would like to apologise for not hearing most of the Minister’s opening speech. I am afraid that the change in the arrangements passed me by completely. I apologise for that and ask for the House’s forgiveness.

The noble Lord talked about the Foreign Office and foreign matters; I want to talk about local government, in particular about the spending figures for the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government. The Treasury booklet about the spending round reports that the local government departmental expenditure limit,

“will increase by £1.1 billion in cash terms”,

which is a lot and is very welcome.

“With this increase in grant, Local Government Core Spending Power”—

which is a mystical figure that everybody in local government talks about and nobody understands—

“is estimated to increase by £2.9 billion in total in 2020-21”.

Again, on the face of it, this is very welcome—and indeed it is.

“Combined with the £2.9 billion increase in Core Spending Power, these announcements mean local authorities can benefit from more than £3½ billion of additional resources”,

with increases in council tax, other grants and so on. This sounds a lot. It sounds as though things are going to be okay. I would suggest that it is not that simple, because a large proportion of that money will go towards the problems of social care and social care funding. These are pretty much in crisis in many places.

I declare my interest as a member of Pendle Borough Council, which is an ordinary shire district in the two-tier area of Lancashire. My concern is with street-level services and local community services, which district councils concentrate on providing. Obviously, unitaries provide them as well, and some county council services come into this category, such as highways and libraries. I want to give some figures from my own council in Pendle, not because is it particularly special—although I think it is—but because it is not special but typical of districts in urban areas, old industrial towns in areas such as Lancashire and many other districts around the country. A report—which goes to councillors tomorrow evening, in fact—points out that the four-year spending settlement, the funding settlement for local government, comes to an end at the end of this financial year. It also points out that there will be a real-terms increase in funding for local government overall—the “core spending power”—which is quite substantial. However, the implementation of the fair funding review and move to 75% business rates retention appear to have been put back, because people are too busy doing other things at the moment. The referendum limit for council tax increase is going back down to 2%. For councils such as Pendle, this will have a fairly disastrous effect.

The detailed implications and figures are obviously not yet known and will not be until the local government settlement comes out in perhaps two or three months’ time. However, making reasonable assumptions, the position in Pendle is that, compared with the present year, there will be a shortfall in 2020-21 of nearly £900,000 that has to be found from cuts and what are called “savings requirements” but are actually cuts. By 2022-23, in three years’ time, the requirement in that year, compared with the present year’s spending, will be around £4 million. Of course, £4 million may be a lot or it may be not so much, depending on the present level of revenue spending. In this year’s revenue budget for Pendle, the aggregate spending level is about £13 million. Over the next three years, £4 million has to be cut from £13 million-worth of spending. By any standards that is a lot, and it is typical of many districts—some will be higher, some will be lower, but it is typical. These are at current prices. This is to an authority which, over 10 years, will have cut its spending in real terms by half, or perhaps more, and in which over the period since 2010 the number of people working for it, without any substantial changes in what it is trying to do and what services it provides, has been halved. The position is dire.

These are not unimportant services. They are perhaps not as important as education, social care or the health service, which gets the high-profile headlines. They are things such as street cleansing, town-centre cleansing and work in the town centres, tackling litter and fly-tipping—if people fly-tip on verges, someone has to clear it up—refuse services, recycling services, and all the things a council tries to do in town centres to keep them as prosperous as possible, and some of ours are doing fairly well. There are also leisure facilities, the deficit on running all the swimming pools and all the rest of it, environmental health and the vital anti-social behaviour work that local authorities newly took over under the anti-social behaviour Act that came in about seven years ago. There are parks and miniparks, open space, playing fields and sporting facilities. Even if you have not got your own council housing, which we no longer do, there are the issues of housing standards and tackling empty properties, bringing them back into use, which we have been quite successful at, and planning and development services. There is also a new one: action on carbon reduction. We have a meeting next Monday evening, which I shall be at, where we will set up a working group on how we in Pendle can do our bit to help solve the climate emergency. The only problem is that we have lots of ideas for things we can do but no staff to do them. It is one of those instances where councils will have to roll up their sleeves and get much more involved.

The position on authorities like this is dire, but it does not matter that the authorities are in dire straits; what matters is that the street-level, town-centre and local community services and facilities that they provide are being stripped away to the extent that they are having a dreadful effect on the community infrastructure in a lot of places. These are places that some people call “left behind” in many cases, places that have not shared in the prosperity of Greater London and the south-east, or even the big towns and cities of regions such as the north of England. I suppose the old cliché of life in the north is that “Life is hard”, but keeping communities going in these areas is hard work. We are not being helped by the fact that, when the Government say, “Austerity is over”, whether it may be or not, the money that is available to other services and areas is not coming to us.