Autumn Statement

Lord Greaves Excerpts

Wednesday 3rd December 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Deighton]

The Government have of course embraced the most significant increase in the national minimum wage. The new rate of £6.50 came into effect on 1 October. This affects about a million people. I have already listed the other things that we have done. These include increasing the personal allowance on a consistent basis, by again another £100 to £10,600, as my right honourable friend announced today, as well as the other measures to deal with cost-of-living challenges.

[Lord Greaves (LD)]

My Lords, I congratulate the Chancellor on his Statement in noticing the shoddy disgrace in the north of England known as Pacer trains. The Statement says:

“I can today confirm that we will tender for new franchises for Northern Rail and the TransPennine Express, replacing the ancient and unpopular Pacer carriages with new and modern trains”.

Noble Lords will remember that these Pacers are four-wheel rattletraps, commonly known by people who have to travel on them as nodding donkeys. I have two questions. First, does that mean that the replacement trains will all be new and modern, or does it mean, as has been suggested, that most of them will simply be refurbished rattletraps from the London Underground or from other places? Secondly, do the Government still have the same commitment to replacing Pacer trains in other parts of the country, such as the south-west?

[Lord Deighton]

It is absolutely the Government’s policy to upgrade our infrastructure in the rolling stock. The Chancellor is the architect of the northern powerhouse, so his commitment to getting that done quickly and effectively for the north is right at the top of his priorities.

Economic Inequality

Lord Greaves Excerpts

Wednesday 23rd October 2013 Lords Chamber

Asked by

[Lord Greaves]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what proposals they have to reduce the level of economic inequality.

[Lord Newby (LD)]

My Lords, income inequality in the UK is now at its lowest level since 1986. The Government are committed to ensuring that all families benefit from the return of growth to the economy and maintain that the best route out of poverty and the best way of reducing inequality is for households to move into work.

[Lord Greaves (LD)]

My Lords, last week we had the report of the Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission, State of the Nation 2013, under the leadership of Mr Alan Milburn and the noble Baroness, Lady Shephard. It concludes that:

“Britain remains a deeply divided country. Disadvantage still strongly shapes life chances. A balanced economic recovery, between different parts of Britain, is not currently within reach”.

Do the Government agree with the broad conclusions of the report that, if we want more social mobility, that has to go hand in hand with a more equal society?

[Lord Newby]

My Lords, the Government agree with the broad conclusions of the report. As the noble Lord says, there are major problems of deep-seated, regional inequalities and imbalances. However, the Government are committed to tackling these, which explains why we have committed more than £2.6 billion to the regional growth fund, why we are committed to High Speed 2 and why apprenticeships, which now stand at 850,000 in the last academic year—some 370,000 more than in the last year of the Labour Government—are taking place largely outside London and the south-east.

Taxation: Income Tax

Lord Greaves Excerpts

Wednesday 6th March 2013 Lords Chamber

Asked By

[Lord Greaves]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what measures they will take to ensure that wage-earners who are below the income tax threshold will benefit from any future increases in the personal allowance.

[Lord Newby]

My Lords, since 2010 the Government have announced successive increases in the personal allowance totalling £2,965. Taken together, these changes will ensure that more than 2.2 million low-income individuals will be removed from income tax altogether. The Government are also taking other measures that will benefit those who are below the income tax threshold, including the introduction of universal credit, support on childcare and the pupil premium.

[Lord Greaves]

My Lords, some 4,300,000 employees already earn too little to benefit from the increase in the personal allowance this year—which I fully support—and this will rise to nearly 5 million workers in 2013-14, about 17% of the labour force, of which two-thirds will be women. How can it be right or fair that a policy trumpeted as helping low-paid workers does nothing for the lowest-paid 5 million? Will the Government look seriously at new ways to end this unfair situation?

[Lord Newby]

My Lords, some of those 5 million were paying income tax until we took them out of income tax, so they have benefited significantly from the changes that we made. The vast bulk of those 5 million are people in work who are not working full time, so one of the key things that we have to try to ensure is that more people are working full time. One of the better statistics on the labour market—which had a good year in many respects last year—is that 32,000 people who were working part time and who wanted to work full time got full-time jobs in the last quarter of last year.

Banking: Bonuses

Lord Greaves Excerpts

Tuesday 11th January 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Sassoon]

Indeed, bonuses based on a number of forms can be remunerative. It is now a fundamental part of the package agreed by G20 Ministers, incorporated in the European capital requirements directive in force from 1 January in the UK, that a significant part of bonuses now has to be paid in a non-cash form and cannot be cashed in for a considerable period. Absolutely, that needs to be part of the structure.

[Lord Greaves]

My Lords, the Independent this morning has some devastating quotes in recent months from the Prime Minister, my right honourable friend the Deputy Prime Minister, the Chancellor and the Business Secretary that can only be taken by ordinary people to mean that large, multimillion pound bonuses would be stopped by the Government. That is the only reasonable interpretation to put on them. Would it be sensible, if senior members of this Government cannot deliver such things, for them not to give the impression that they are going to do so? That is simply a propaganda own goal. Would the Minister also comment on the view from a former Business Secretary that the rich have suffered enough?

[Lord Sassoon]

My Lords, I am conscious of the time. All I can say is that my right honourable friend the Chancellor has made it completely clear what we are doing today, which is a considerable package of things, one element of which is to talk actively to the banks with the aim of ensuring that the bonuses they will pay this year will be lower than they would otherwise have paid.

Comprehensive Spending Review

Lord Greaves Excerpts

Monday 1st November 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Greaves]

My Lords, this very great debate has concentrated on four aspects of the spending reductions: the timing, the speed, the size and the distribution. Along with other noble Lords, I want to concentrate particularly on the last of those—the distribution. In doing so, I follow some excellent contributions from the right reverend Prelate, the Bishop of Leicester, and the noble Baronesses, Lady Campbell and Lady Hollis, among others. I want specifically to talk about the situation in local government, and in doing so I declare an interest as a member of Pendle Borough Council in Lancashire.

If there are to be cuts, no one in local government believes that local government should not carry its fair share; the question is what the fair share is. There is an increasing concern and realisation within local government that the sector is perhaps being hit rather worse than others. The figure of 28 per cent over four years has been given as the reduction in the government grants. The problem with local government finance is that it so is complicated that, as the Government have not yet made any crucial announcements about the distribution of the cuts, it is difficult to be certain what will happen. However, there seem to be at least three major problems.

The first is that the cut to the main grant to local authorities—the formula grant—is to be front-loaded. That will put local authorities in an immediate difficulty because, of the four years of cuts that are to come, the highest cuts are to be in the first year. The treasurer of my council suggests that the cuts will be 10.7 per cent in the first year, then 6.4 per cent in the second year, 0.9 per cent in the third year—which is a curiosity that I do not understand—and 5.6 per cent in the fourth year. My view is that, as the fourth year will be a general election year, that 5.6 per cent cut will probably not happen, but the first two certainly will and they will cause real difficulties.

The second general problem is that, for the very best of reasons, specific grants are being abolished and “rolled up” into the formula grant. The way in which that will impact on individual authorities is problematical, to put it mildly. Many of the specific grants—area-based grants and others, such as the working neighbourhoods fund—have been specifically allocated to authorities on the basis of indices of disadvantage. There is a real danger that, if those grants are wrapped up in the general grant, the authorities that have been defined as being in the most need will miss out the most.

The third problem is that the proportion of council budgets that is accounted for in formula grant and revenue grants varies enormously from council to council. The figures that I was given in a Written Answer just before the summer suggest that the proportion varies from 10 per cent to two-thirds of a council’s budget. Most of the councils that you would think of as being in disadvantaged areas—if I may use that phrase—are clearly those that receive a higher proportion of grant. That is for very good reasons: namely, their needs are greater and their local resource base is smaller. However, there is a real risk that, in rolling everything up into the formula grant, the councils that will be hit hardest will be those most in need of support. In other words, the changes in local authority grant will result in a redistribution from poor areas to rich areas, to put it in fairly basic but accurate terms.

For my council and neighbouring councils such as Burnley and Blackburn, which are in the top 50 in the country under the indices of disadvantage, it is suggested that the revenue grant reduction, taken as a whole, may well be over 20 per cent. Similar-sized councils in leafier areas—not all but many of them in the south of England—may get by with significantly lower reductions. This is, I believe, a major test for the coalition Government. If the fears turn out to be true, the coalition will be wide open to accusations of favouring rich Tory areas against perhaps less rich Labour and Liberal Democrat areas. That is not what I am saying, but that is the accusation that will be made and it will be very difficult for people like me to defend it. In fact, I shall be standing up and saying it myself if that happens.

I want to give the House one example of the difficulties caused by the move from specific grants to rolled-up general grants. The example relates to the position of the Lancashire Police Authority—which covers the area in which I live—on police community support officers, or PCSOs. There are 427 full-time equivalent PCSO posts, of which 409 PCSOs are in post at the moment. The police authority has started a formal 90-day consultation process with a view to disestablishing all 427 PCSO posts from 31 March 2011. In other words, there is the potential for all the PCSOs to lose their jobs and for the work that they do in the county to be closed down.

The basic problem is that the PCSOs are all funded by specific grants to the police authority rather than from the police authority’s general budget. If that grant was taken away and the police authority general budget was secure and not being reduced, the authority might be able to cope, but at a time when the grant towards its core budget is being reduced, the police authority will find it impossible to fund the £10.5 million a year that the PCSOs cost. Some £8.2 million comes from direct PCSO grant from the Government and the rest—£2.3 million—comes from other contributions, many from district councils and unitary authorities within the police authority area that will obviously be under very severe pressure in respect of their own services. Therefore, the relationship between the specific grant and core funding—and whether the new system in which all the grants are rolled up takes account of the existing provision provided by those specific grants—is crucial. We will wait to see what happens.

Why do PCSOs matter? They are the basis of an extraordinarily successful community policing system in Lancashire, which was a pioneer of modern community policing about seven years ago. That system has been rolled out throughout the county and is a fantastic success. Every ward in the county has a small community policing team consisting of a constable called a community beat manager and a community support officer—a PCSO. They act as friends and support for residents. They do an enormous amount of useful work in the community among traders, schools and wherever there are problems. They act as the eyes and ears of the police in the community. There are residents meetings called PACTs—police and communities together—as well as a community safety partnership involving councillors, residents, traders and voluntary groups. It is incredibly successful. It works. I have received two pages written by a local PCSO that have been provided to me by the county’s UNISON branch.

What PCSOs do is fantastic. They are involved in everything from keeping a friendly eye on well-known local criminals, and making sure that they know what those people are up to, through to road safety for kids. It works. The levels of local crime—burglaries, drug offences, vehicle crime, criminal damage, less serious assaults and, in particular, anti-social behaviour—in my part of the county and throughout the county have plummeted. PCSOs are there on the ground doing what everybody wants them to do when we talk about bobbies on the beat. They are a modern form of bobbies on the beat. They do not just walk up and down every street in a regulated way; they are part of and work with the community. As somebody who attends the PACT meetings in my ward and works with the local community police, I can say that it really works. The detection rate in Colne at least, which is the highest in the county, is about 40 per cent. That is incredibly high. In the case of serious and organised crime, the PCSOs are the people on the ground who have the basic information when something important happens, so we do not have to start from scratch.

Community policing has been a Liberal Democrat talisman policy for many years; the Conservatives have always stood as the party of law and order. These are front-line services—the front line of the thin blue line, if you like—and they are the big society, because the whole community is involved in what goes on. I do not believe that a Government consisting of Liberal Democrats and a majority of Conservatives can possibly tolerate a situation in which the incredibly successful scheme that has been created throughout Lancashire in the past few years is done away with. Building things up takes time; doing away with them can be achieved overnight. I do not expect the Minister to give me detailed answers on this, but I hope that he will bring my remarks to the attention of his colleagues in DCLG and the Home Office.