Council Tax
Lord Greaves Excerpts(5 years, 9 months ago)
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Lord Greaves
To ask Her Majesty’s Government what assessment they have made of the levels of council tax in England that have been announced for 2019–20.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government and Wales Office (Lord Bourne of Aberystwyth) (Con)
My Lords, decisions on council tax levels are for local authorities, although the Government maintain referendum thresholds to allow voters in England to have the final say on any excessive increases. Authorities have set their council tax for the next financial year, and on 27 March the Government will publish the national statistics.
Lord Greaves (LD)
My Lords, it is amazing that most councils set it at the level set by the Government. Is it not the case that council tax levels in England are coming out at an average 4.5% increase? I declare an interest as a borough councillor in Colne, where the increase is 6% across the board. Local authorities are being hollowed out, their services are being slashed and in many areas they are teetering on the edge of an existential crisis. Will the Conservative Party go to the elections this year and tell people: “Vote Conservative—get less, pay more”?
Lord Bourne of Aberystwyth
My Lords, when the national statistics are published, the calculation is almost certainly going to be that the level is 4.8%, but we cannot be absolutely certain about that. Of course, local authorities have the option of going to their electorate and seeking a higher level of council tax. The fact that they do not is indicative of the fact that they know what the result would be.
Fracking: Planning Guidance
Lord Greaves Excerpts(5 years, 9 months ago)
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Lord Greaves
To ask Her Majesty’s Government what steps they intend to take in response to the High Court ruling that their planning guidance on fracking is unlawful.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government and Wales Office (Lord Bourne of Aberystwyth) (Con)
My Lords, the Government note the judgment and are considering their next steps.
Lord Greaves (LD)
My Lords, I am pleased to hear that. Is this not yet another case where the Government seem to be lacking basic procedural competence? More widely, it seems rather strange that the Government want widespread extraction of methane from rocks in this country at a time when the climate crisis affecting the world is getting worse. Perhaps more pertinently to the Conservative Party, do the Government really think it is politically sustainable for them to cover large areas of the English countryside, which are often Conservative strongholds, with hundreds and thousands of fracking wells?
Lord Bourne of Aberystwyth
My Lords, in case people are misled into thinking that there are hundreds of such wells at the moment, there are not. Once again, this was a policy introduced under the coalition Government. We believe that the technology is worth looking at, because methane presents a bridge between fossil fuels and renewables, and is the best of the hydrocarbons in terms of pollution. But we are committed to ensuring that it is also safe and environmentally sound and that there is a strong regulatory system.
Planning: Permitted Development Rights
Lord Greaves Excerpts(5 years, 11 months ago)
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Lord Bourne of Aberystwyth
My Lords, the noble Lord never disappoints and today is no exception. I certainly agree that we are a nation that depends very much on trade; we are also a nation that is very dependent on the sea. Both those things inform the Government’s broader policy concerns.
Lord Greaves (LD)
My Lords, does the Minister agree that not all places are the same and not all high streets are in collapse? Some are surviving, such as that in Colne, the town I live in—I declare my interest as a councillor there. Therefore, what is needed is not a new set of one-policy-fits-all rules imposed on councils but flexibility for all local councils to adopt the policies which are appropriate in their areas.
Lord Bourne of Aberystwyth
My Lords, I share the noble Lord’s view that it is important that we have that diversity. As he indicates, there are many successful high streets. He mentioned Colne but the high street awards, sponsored by my honourable friend in the other place and Visa, have also been very successful. I am pleased to say that the overall winner was Crickhowell but Altrincham was the winner in England. We are looking at many ways of promoting the high street but the noble Lord is absolutely right that one size does not fit all.
Provisional Local Government Finance Settlement
Lord Greaves Excerpts(6 years ago)
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Lord Bourne of Aberystwyth
My Lords, I thank my noble friend for the points that she makes and the general welcome she gives to the settlement, which is fair and right. I acknowledge the challenge faced by the high streets. I am sure she would acknowledge the help announced in the Statement relating to them. Part of this is because of the changing nature of the high street. We cannot, Canute-like, stand in the way of that. What we can do is look at the position relating to the taxation of digital and online sales. My right honourable friend the Chancellor has announced that he is looking at this. I will not name the companies; we all know them. This is a way to deal with that. It is not inherent to the Statement on local government because that does not relate to general taxation policy.
On money for roads, it is for local authorities to determine how they can repair and improve their roads. There will be more detail on that spending and how that money will be distributed to local authorities in an additional Statement that I hope will supply the information my noble friend needs.
Lastly, my noble friend rightly mentioned Salisbury as an important town affected by policy on the high street. It is remarkable how resilient Salisbury has been throughout the difficult period after the Novichok incidents. The Government have given support to Salisbury to help it through, and I have been in touch with the cathedral on a fairly regular basis to see how the community is faring.
Lord Greaves (LD)
My Lords, I remind the House that I am an elected district councillor. Although I am not as excited by the settlement as other noble Lords, my council benefits from a bit of Maundy money above what it thought it would get.
Does the Minister understand that when people talk about the council, look at their council tax bill and say, “What do I get for it?”, a lot of the things that impinge on them directly are provided by local district councils in two-tier areas? I have a huge list here that I will not read out, but it is basically recreation and leisure services, street-level services and community-based problem-solving—town centre problems that directly affect people. A lot of ordinary district councils up and down this country are in dire straits. I would love the statistics that were read out for the average or aggregate cuts to government funding and local authority spending to be the case for the district councils in east Lancashire. They are in a much worse position.
Does the Minister accept that, while there is a bit of sugar on the pill this year, we are in the middle of a three-year settlement where councils all had to sign on the dotted line to say that they agree to it, while it is really asking them whether they want to lose a leg or two arms? The Government have provided a little bag of sweeties this time by saying, “Okay, we’re not going to refuse them”, but unless they tackle these basic-level services that do not fit into the high priorities of social care, health and so on, vital though they are, local government as people know it will collapse in quite a few parts of the country within two or three years.
Lord Bourne of Aberystwyth
My Lords, I acknowledge the great role that the noble Lord plays in his local authority district in Pendle and I recognise the great work done by local districts up and down the country. He will appreciate, however, that there are a lot of areas that are unitary, where there is not this two-tier system. A lot of what I have talked about, in answering questions and in the Statement itself, relates to the county councils, but much of this will benefit the district councils, where they exist, such as the business rate retention system. Again, Lancashire is a beneficiary of this and it is worth recognising that as well. I recognise the challenges that exist and I know that many local authorities struggle with the financial position. That said, we need to see how costs may be contained and where some back-office costs can be shared. That need not necessarily be via unitisation; it could be done by sharing some of the costs and back-office functions.
I should also say, on the multi-year settlements that the noble Lord referred to, that many councils—perhaps most councils, most councillors and most people offering services—would recognise their importance and desirability, because it gives a guarantee of how payments and settlements will be made into the future.
Citizenship and Civic Engagement (Select Committee Report)
Lord Greaves Excerpts(6 years, 1 month ago)
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Lord Greaves (LD)
My Lords, it is good to follow such an excellent speech from a member of the committee and to congratulate her and all the other members under the leadership of the noble Lord, Lord Hodgson, on a report that is a very interesting read. It is a big report that makes a juicy meal and it deserves to be chewed over for a long time yet. The government response, by comparison, is a shrivelled morsel and extremely disappointing. When I first read it I asked my wife, Heather, who before she retired was a lifelong ESOL teacher, to have a look at the section on ESOL. She laughed every so often, and I asked her why. She said, “Oh, that is something we invented 30 years ago”, and, “We did that 20 years ago”. We know what works with ESOL and we know what works with the hard-to-reach groups, particularly ladies who come over from the south Asian countries. The real problem is that over the past 10 years the Government have cut funding for ESOL by more than 50%. A lot of people have been pushed into the arms of private providers who set up little so-called schools. Frankly, quite a few of them are just ripping people off.
I turn to the particular phrase “fundamental British values”. I have to say that the government response is very disappointing. That phrase is divisive for a lot of people. I wonder if it is separatist, which might be appropriate or not, given what is going on with Brexit at the moment; I do not know. We should remember that for a lot of the people who have come to live in this country over the past two or three generations, the Empire is very much a part of their family life. The phrase is supremacist and in any case it is condescending. It suggests to everyone else that, “Our values are better than yours”. That is wrong. The phrase “shared values of British citizenship” is good because it sets out what the values are but does not say that they are intrinsically or specifically British.
A section in the report I want to refer to concerns active citizenship and civic engagement. I shall talk about my own experience in a small town in Lancashire called Colne. It is where I live and I declare an interest as a local councillor there. Paragraph 12 of the report quotes Dr Henry Tam, who,
“emphasised to us the important distinction between the two”—
active citizenship and civic engagement. Dr Tam went on to say:
“One is volunteering and helping strangers. The other sense, quite different, is about democratic participation. You can do one without the other”.
That is true, but I think that it is much more complicated than that. Where local democracy, involvement and engagement really work—and they still do really work in many smaller communities and some others in this country—the two are closely interrelated. It may be a continuum but it is just a very complicated mixture of people who are local politicians, local volunteers, those getting involved because they are traders, local residents or those working in schools, who then overlap. Colne is a town with a lot of volunteers and lots—too many, some people think—of elected local politicians. They work together and many people are in both roles. We have a series of local organisations and structures where local politicians across all parties work together—at least we do outside election periods—and with other people to get things done locally in an old Lancashire cotton town. Fifty or 60 years ago, two-thirds of the people there worked in weaving mills; now, there are no mills left. It is that sort of place.
Ten years ago, an organisation called Colne in Bloom was set up by a councillor colleague of mine in my ward. It brings together a series of people from across the town, including all sorts of groups and organisations from community centres and schools, and residents who do things in their street alongside the main activities in the town centre. I do not know for how many years we have won a gold award, but it is at least five or six, perhaps more. This is a good example of leadership, which comes partly from councillors, partly from people who are not councillors and partly from people who have been or will be councillors.
Neighbourhood plans are one good thing to have come out of the coalition through the Localism Act. They form a statutory part of the local plan once they are adopted. In areas such as ours, which is entirely parished nowadays—we did that deliberately to involve more people—they are the responsibility of the parish council and town council. In Colne, the initiative has been taken by current town councillors who originally got involved with major residents’ campaigns objecting to inappropriate planning applications. There is a huge overlap there. In the parish where I live, Trawden Forest, we had a referendum last week or the week before that approved our neighbourhood plan. I declare an interest as a largely corresponding member of the little group that put it together. In that collection of people, some people had never been involved in such things before but got involved because they were interested in the plan, some were parish councillors and some were both.
Colne Town Council now runs all the events in Colne, of which the most important each year is the Great British Rhythm & Blues Festival, which happens every August bank holiday. In every month throughout the year, a series of events brings people into the town and gives it a sense of well-being. It involves people; they can enjoy themselves. The council runs it but does not have lots of staff to do that, as a big council would. The town councillors, of which I am not one, roll their sleeves up and do a large amount of the work. The overlap between local politicians elected to the town council on political labels and volunteers is not clear-cut—and neither should it be. We have lots of community centres that we thought we should set up as community hubs 20 or 30 years ago. They are now run by local volunteers and local committees, and so it goes on.
My final point is that Colne is a town. Fortunately, in all the time that I have been involved in it, along with a lot of other people, we have managed to maintain civic culture, civic involvement and “civic society”, if that is what you call it—that is, the involvement of local people in the town, keeping it going in very difficult circumstances. After the local government reorganisation in 1974, a lot of towns lost their councils, civic culture and institutions, suffering very badly as a result. Every change in local government and local democracy nowadays seems to involve making things bigger, amalgamating things and reducing the number of councillors, the number of elections and the amount of local democracy and accountability. It is wrong. We have to go back and look at towns. Big cities are all right—they can cope—but towns need a lot of time, attention and care to rebuild their civic culture if they are to be successful in future.
Affordable Housing
Lord Greaves Excerpts(6 years, 1 month ago)
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Lord Greaves (LD)
My Lords, I wish to speak on behalf of a distant land—parts of the north of England—with a different perspective, where councils want to provide more affordable and other housing but cannot do so due to local housing market conditions, and where Homes England has failed to adapt its policies to local conditions. I speak with particular knowledge of east Lancashire—Pennine Lancashire—and declare my interest as a local councillor there.
These are areas where land prices are low—some will think them unbelievably low—and where the uplift in land values when houses are built can be negative, taking into account all the costs of the land. In my ward, for example, you can buy two or three-bedroom terraced houses for between £50,000 and £100,000. They are good, decent houses that are well worth living in. Former council houses cost £75,000 or a bit more. New two-bedroom houses in my ward can be bought for £130,000. Renting costs £400, and that is for a month and not a week.
The costs of building a house or managing a rented house in these areas are nevertheless the same as in other areas. There is therefore a huge question of the economic viability of new housing. If the costs of building, including land remediation on brownfield sites, are more than can be recovered from sales or rents, it needs gap funding. It is no good providing loans, because if the housing is not viable, the loans cannot in future be repaid; it needs subsidies from somewhere.
I have with me an internal briefing from my own council in Pendle, written by the senior council officer responsible for development and given to me to use by the chief executive. It is clearly too long to read out to the House, although I would really like to do so. I have provided a copy to the Minister and ask him to pass it to appropriate civil servants and to provide some answers as to how we can contribute with regard to the need to provide housing in the whole country. There is a need for housing in our area; there is just not a financial market for it.
I shall quote one sentence: “As the HCA approach”—
or Homes England as it now is—
“has moved from a regional to a more national one, increasingly we are having problems accessing funding as we are in competition with authorities across the country who often have better housing markets and the availability of much larger sites”.
The briefing gives as an example one site, Further Clough Head in Nelson, which is suitable for 200 housing units—that is big by our standards. It needs gap funding. The council has applied under five different schemes but not yet been successful. The problem is that the methodology that Homes England now uses does not cater for areas such as ours. It requires an uplift in land values, which is not there; it places an emphasis on funding much larger schemes, which it will find easier but is no use for us; it does not cater for specific local needs; and it imposes risk in respect of these marginal sites on local authorities and their agencies, which the local authorities simply cannot take on. If Homes England is not able to share the risk, it is very difficult.
I have with me a list of government schemes over the past five or six years. There were no fewer than eight or nine, which your Lordships will all be familiar with, from which the councils tried to get funding and all we got was peanuts. There are different places and different circumstances. Can we please have different policies, so that we can contribute to providing the houses that the country needs?
Local Neighbourhood Services
Lord Greaves Excerpts(6 years, 10 months ago)
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Lord Greaves
To ask Her Majesty’s Government what priority they give to the provision of and funding for local neighbourhood services.
Lord Greaves (LD)
My Lords, I beg leave to ask the Question standing in my name on the Order Paper and remind the House of my registered interest as a district councillor.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government and Wales Office (Lord Bourne of Aberystwyth) (Con)
My Lords, the local government financial settlement sees a real-terms increase in resources to local government over the next two years and gives councils the ability to protect important services. However, local authority spending priorities are ultimately a matter for local decision.
Lord Greaves
My Lords, the Government are of course right that local priorities will be decided locally, but when the question is which services to cut the priorities are rather different. Across the country, fewer streets are being swept, libraries and leisure facilities are being closed, 500 children’s centres have closed, neighbourhood policing is collapsing in many areas, there are fewer food inspections and in many places local bus services are being removed, while throughout the country it appears that local authorities are totally unable to fill in potholes. Do the Government not realise that what is going on cannot continue much longer without the whole fabric of local community services being destroyed?
Lord Bourne of Aberystwyth
My Lords, I shall take just a couple of examples from the rather dismal litany of the noble Lord. On libraries, I shall take the example of Worcestershire, where a very innovative way of running libraries as community hubs is being perfected. That is true also of Greenwich; it is not just Conservative local authorities that are doing that. The noble Lord mentioned potholes. We announced a pothole fund of £296 million in 2016.
Thirlmere Reservoir
Lord Greaves Excerpts(6 years, 10 months ago)
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Lord Greaves
To ask Her Majesty’s Government, following objections by the Ministry of Defence, whether they intend to call in the planning application for zip wires across Thirlmere Reservoir.
Lord Greaves (LD)
My Lords, I beg leave to ask the Question standing in my name on the Order Paper, and remind the House of my registered interest in outdoor activities.
Lord Bourne of Aberystwyth (Con)
My Lords, I think we are all intrigued by that. This application is currently under consideration by the Lake District National Park Authority. Noble Lords will appreciate that it would be inappropriate for me to comment on a current planning application. However, I can confirm that as this is within both a national park and a world heritage site, policies in the National Planning Policy Framework already give significant protection. The framework is a material consideration in any planning application.
Lord Greaves
My Lords, I will happily take the noble Lord rock climbing in the Lake District. Zip wires across Thirlmere are a very bad idea. They would be an inappropriate commercial intrusion into England’s premier national park, where fundamental policies include the conservation of the landscape together with recreational uses which are in harmony with that landscape, based firmly on the Sandford principles. Do the Government agree that their overriding responsibility, as the national Government in England, for this national park and nationally important natural heritage site—and indeed, as the Minister said, world heritage site—as the jewel in the English crown, means that they really ought to call in this application and stop it now?
Lord Bourne of Aberystwyth
My Lords, first of all, the Lake District is undoubtedly a jewel in the way that the noble Lord describes. However, I thought that there might be a Pendle dimension to this Question so, with a sort of macabre fascination, I googled “Lord Greaves Pendle zip wire” and found with alarm that there had indeed been a zip wire in Pendle until some 18 months ago. However, on the more serious issue, clearly we recognise, as I have indicated, that the national park is important. It was made a world heritage site relatively recently and became a national park longer ago. Both of those are factors that will be borne in mind with regard to the planning application, which I cannot comment on.
Brexit: Affordable Housing
Lord Greaves Excerpts(7 years ago)
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Lord Greaves
To ask Her Majesty’s Government what is their assessment of the impact of the United Kingdom leaving the European Union on the provision of housing that people can afford.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Communities and Local Government and Wales Office (Lord Bourne of Aberystwyth) (Con)
My Lords, the Government are committed to achieving an ambitious EU exit deal and building the homes that this country needs. In pursuing its housing policies, DCLG engages widely with stakeholders across the housing sector. The Government are on track to raise housing supply, by the end of this Parliament, to its highest annual level since 1970 and then to 300,000 per year on average by the mid-2020s.
Lord Greaves (LD)
My Lords, I wish the Government the best of luck in that endeavour and will be happy to welcome it when it happens. Only yesterday, the Federation of Master Builders issued the result of a survey of small and medium-sized construction firm members, in which three-quarters of them said that it would have a negative impact on the health of their business if any of their EU workers returned to their country of origin. The figure for the value of these workers was much higher as well. What are the Government doing to make sure that workers from European Union countries working in the construction industry—many of them building houses—do not stay away, as is being suggested, even after this Christmas?
Lord Bourne of Aberystwyth
My Lords, the noble Lord is right to highlight the importance to the construction sector of workers from the EU; they constitute about 18% across the country, although obviously it is higher than that in some parts of the country and certainly in London. The Government are of course very much aware of this and it is part of our negotiations. The noble Lord will be aware that we have made a fair and serious offer to protect the rights and entitlements of EU nationals, which is all part of making sure that we extend a welcome to those people who are part of the fabric of our life and who are very important to our economy.
Waste Collection Services
Lord Greaves Excerpts(7 years, 1 month ago)
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Lord Greaves
To ask Her Majesty’s Government what is their assessment of the current and future level of services for the collection of recycled materials and other refuse from domestic properties.
Lord Greaves (LD)
My Lords, I beg leave to ask the Question standing in my name on the Order Paper. In doing so, I remind the House of my registered interest as an elected councillor.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Communities and Local Government and Wales Office (Lord Bourne of Aberystwyth) (Con)
My Lords, noble Lords will be aware that government policy on waste and recycling is led by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, although we work together closely on these issues. Councils play a central role in achieving high recycling rates, and we want to see them provide comprehensive waste and recycling collection services that have the support of local house- holders. We have provided local government with over £200 billion for this spending period and, although councils make their own spending decisions, we expect them to prioritise what they do to deliver what their residents want to see and to ensure good waste management practice.
Lord Greaves
My Lords, as a neighbourhood service, refuse collection and recycling is subject to some of the worst cuts, which are being enforced by the Minister’s department and not Defra. As an example, in Lancashire, the county council is the disposal authority and has been providing an annual grant of almost £1 million to each of the collection authorities—the districts. It is scrapping that grant from next March because of its own financial problems imposed by the Minister and his team. This will inevitably reduce the amount of recycling, the frequency of collections and the quality of service. What does the Minister have to say about that?
Lord Bourne of Aberystwyth
My Lords, I have to say, first, that it is nonsense. The department does not dictate what is spent by Lancashire—or Pendle, the noble Lord’s collection authority. That is a matter for them within the budget. Noble Lords may not be aware that Pendle’s recycling rate is 35.5%, so there is certainly room to make up to get to the national average—but the national average is improving and we are on course to meet our recycling obligations under European and domestic law.