Oral Answers to Questions
Debate between Lord Pickles and Lord Watts
Mr Dave Watts (St Helens North) (Lab)
T1. If he will make a statement on his departmental responsibilities.
The Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government (Mr Eric Pickles)
I am sure the supplementary question will be very good, Mr Speaker.
I would like to update the House on the Government’s ongoing work on flood response and recovery. The Somerset levels continue to face significant flooding, and the threat from extreme high levels of groundwater will remain for some months in parts of the country. However, across the country local recovery efforts are well under way. I can reassure the House that the Government are determined in their efforts to support all those affected to get back on their feet. The Government have today announced a £2 million package to encourage holidaymakers, from home and abroad, to see for themselves that areas affected by flooding are now open for business.
Local Government Finance
Debate between Lord Pickles and Lord Watts
Mr Pickles
Birmingham. The council put 16-year-olds on the same wages as adults. It made a mistake and it was foolish to do so—[Interruption.] The hon. Gentleman should listen, because he is probably not used to dealing with poor people—[Interruption.] No, no—a toff has an opportunity occasionally to meet the odd poor person. What was really bad about Birmingham involves the second part of the question from the hon. Member for Birmingham, Yardley (John Hemming) and how the council is seeking to get 23% council tax from poor people. As a committed socialist the hon. Member for Birmingham, Selly Oak should be on the phone now telling the leadership of Birmingham to look after the poor, not to tax them.
Mr Dave Watts (St Helens North) (Lab)
The Secretary of State will be aware that the Audit Commission has made it absolutely clear that the biggest cuts are hitting the poorest communities and boroughs. What is the public to believe: his fiddled figures or the Audit Commission?
Mr Pickles
The hon. Gentleman is being very selective in his reporting, but it is absolutely clear that the poorest authorities are receiving a smaller cut than the more wealthy authorities. The protection that we have offered the former in this settlement is better than the protection offered under the Labour Government.
Oral Answers to Questions
Debate between Lord Pickles and Lord Watts(12 years, 1 month ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text
Mr Pickles
My hon. Friend is rightly proud of his council. The website is exemplary, as is the information available to tenants. We are committed to ensuring that people have a clear understanding of right to buy, which offers discounts of up to £75,000. I hope the Local Government Association takes note of that excellent piece of work.
Mr Dave Watts (St Helens North) (Lab)
5. When he expects to announce the allocation of the transitional council tax grant to local authorities.
Oral Answers to Questions
Debate between Lord Pickles and Lord Watts
Mr Dave Watts (St Helens North) (Lab)
1. What recent assessment he has made of the likely change in the provision of services by local authorities as a result of reductions in the level of Government funding to such authorities.
The Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government (Mr Eric Pickles)
We have given councils much greater flexibility and the financial autonomy to manage their budgets. If they share back-office services, join forces to get better value for money, cut excessive chief executive pay, and root out waste and fraud, they can protect key front-line services.
Mr Watts
I thank the Secretary of State for his response, but does it not demonstrate that he is miles away from the reality of what is happening in the streets? My local authority, which is one of the most efficient and a four-star authority that has frozen its council tax for four years, is faced with 500 job losses, massive cuts in most of its services and a £28 million loss in spending in its local economy. What is he going to do about that?
Mr Pickles
I recognise that the hon. Gentleman has many duties in this House, but perhaps he should have spoken to his council leader, Councillor Marie Rimmer, who says:
“most job losses”
will be
“achieved by not filling posts, early retirement and voluntary redundancies”,
which is hardly the position that he paints. It is also telling that Sally Yeoman, the chief executive of Halton and St Helens Voluntary and Community Action, blames the drop in funding on the ending of the working neighbourhoods fund—a fund that the Labour party had decided to end in March.
Local Government Funding
Debate between Lord Pickles and Lord Watts
The Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government (Mr Eric Pickles)
I am most grateful to the right hon. Member for Don Valley (Caroline Flint). I could hear the gentle scribble of history being rewritten. I think that had Winston Smith been part of the process, he would have been down to his second stub of pencil by now. I would happily have walked into Room 101 just to hear the end of it.
We are really very pleased, in a way, that the motion has been tabled. We in the Department are very sensitive people, and we felt that we had done something wrong as far as the right hon. Lady was concerned. She doesn’t phone, she rarely writes, she asks few questions, and she seems to be unaware that we have laid statements. We thought somehow that she was not all that interested. So we are very pleased that she is now back in action, and is taking an interest in the Department. Admittedly it seemed a weird time for her to do so, given that the settlement is just a few days away, but then it occurred to me: she has a plan.
It is all about the business of the blank piece of paper. The right hon. Lady is actually going to write something down. She is going to give us some Labour policy. We are going to be told, in this debate—[Interruption.] I am optimistic. We are going to be told what percentage of cuts the right hon. Lady thinks reasonable. The Local Government Association has already given us a percentage. If the right hon. Lady—who spoke for hardly any time—wants to give us a percentage that she considers reasonable for the coming year, I will happily give way to her.
Mr Pickles
I will happily give way for a trip down memory lane. What does the hon. Gentleman want to tell us about the 1980s?
Mr Watts
It is the 1960s that I want to talk about. The Secretary of State is trying to take us back to them. Can he explain why he is front-loading the cuts? Everyone knows that he is doing it because a general election is coming. [Hon. Members: “What?”] Well, he knows when the election will come. Can he tell us why he is front-loading the cuts? It is a simple question.
Mr Pickles
The hon. Gentleman may be wondering why he is sitting on that side of the House. We have had a general election. His party lost and we won, which is why we are on this side of the House. As for the front-loading—[Interruption.]
Mr Pickles
My hon. Friend is right. There is increasingly a trend towards reducing backroom services and I welcome the support from the right hon. Member for Don Valley. Perhaps the clearest message that should go out from the Chamber today is that there is broad consensus on the sharing of services and it would be a very wise chief executive and leader of a council who continued with that process.
Of course, part of the problem is that the so-called operational savings that the Labour party promised were simply not met. When I opened the Department’s books, I noticed that almost £1 billion of planned efficiency savings promised by the Department and announced in the 2007 spending review and the 2009 Budget were never delivered by Labour Ministers.
We know that Labour had secret plans for cuts for local communities, but it did not have a route map to get there through constructive reform. The Labour Government had 13 years to improve the system of local government funding but they fluffed it. They introduced 10 different Acts that affected local government finance. They scrapped capping, then they reintroduced it. They gave pensioners an extra payment for their council tax, then they dropped it. They passed a law to hold a council tax revaluation, and then passed a law to delay it. They published a local government finance Green Paper, then a White Paper, then they held a balance of funding review, and then they held the Lyons inquiry review. They then extended the Lyons inquiry review and when the Lyons inquiry reported, they did not even bother to issue a formal response.
In the 2010 Labour manifesto, we were promised a cross-party commission on local government finance. Perhaps Labour just ran out of ideas and wanted to ask us. The final Labour initiative, with the third leader in three years, is the famous blank piece of paper. No wonder the shadow Housing Minister, the hon. Member for Plymouth, Moor View (Alison Seabeck), has admitted
“we won’t rush into policy making”—
[Interruption.] I am glad she has confirmed that. Perhaps they are waiting for the next Labour leader. I suspect that that will not be long now—like with buses, one waits around for ages and three come along pretty quickly.
Mr Pickles
I am sorry, but if I wanted to visit the 1980s I would watch an episode of “Life on Mars”.
I welcome the opportunity to lay to rest some of the reckless scaremongering that the Labour party has peddled in recent weeks, and particularly in the past few moments. We are a few days away from the settlement and it is important that we do not create a climate in which wacky, fictitious figures end up scaring people unnecessarily without adding anything to the debate.
Mr Pickles
I always enjoyed it when the right hon. Lady occupied my role, so I am sorry to tell her that this is not like a deficit; we have to pay down the debt in relation to non-domestic rates, so the money that she suggests will be available will not be available for what she suggests. In case she thinks I am just making a rhetorical point, I am willing to write to her, copying in the right hon. Member for Don Valley, explaining this issue. If £5.5 billion were suddenly available, I think I might have used it by now.
The points that SIGOMA makes could be made by the county councils network, the district councils network, the SPARSE Rural group and my dear chums at the London councils. They could produce similar figures on how the funding system seems to channel more money to certain areas. Before Labour jumps on these bandwagons, it needs to realise that it cannot play the mets against the shires and then campaign honestly at the May district council elections.
Mr Pickles
We will listen to all representations. We are moving to meet the points made by the Local Government Association and other interested parties. We intend to deliver a fair and sustainable settlement that protects the most vulnerable communities and spreads the impact in a manageable way.
Mr Pickles
The hon. Gentleman seems to have left the 1980s for the 1970s and “Jim’ll Fix It”. There is no intention to fix this or to hit vulnerable communities the hardest. We will be doing our best and I hope that the hon. Gentleman will be ready to praise me next week when we produce our proposals. Frankly, he should take with a pinch of salt some of the more alarmist predictions of jobs cuts that have been fed to the media by the unions and others. Such dossiers are based on looking at local media and projecting them out. We see unions being upset by stories that unions themselves have placed.
Reducing the number of posts is not the same as job cuts, as staffing can be reduced through natural wastage and freezing. The unions have intentionally misled on the issuing of section 188 notices, which allow the terms and conditions of workers to be changed to save money. The GMB has claimed that 26,000 staff in Birmingham face “the threat of redundancy”. Indeed, that would be a shocking figure—26,000 workers faced with redundancy. In fact, the process seeks to reform car allowances and staff parking, and is nothing more than that. It is designed to reduce the scope for redundancies. Even Leon Trotsky at his worst would not have taken to the streets over car parking. Such reforms reduce the scope for redundancies and do not increase them.