Welfare Reform Bill

Debate between Lord Watts and Andrew Percy

Wednesday 1st February 2012 Commons Chamber

[Andrew Percy]

We all want to achieve a service that is fit for purpose, but I am not sure that the charge is about delivering such a service. It will certainly not cover the cost of so doing. It seems to be more about effecting a cultural change, and I do not believe that charging the mother £20 will effect such a change. It would therefore end up being a tax on the mother who is trying to get money from an errant father. That is why I have a bit of a problem with the principle.

[Mr Watts]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Andrew Percy]

I will not give way at the moment, as I want to say a little something about under-occupancy, and a lot of people want to speak in the debate.

I listened to the debate about under-occupancy, and I am sorry that it turned into such a knockabout. There is significant under-occupancy in parts of the area that I represent. In my time as a councillor in the city of Hull, I represented a big council estate on which there was a huge amount of under-occupancy, which was largely, but not entirely, due to older people. Dealing with the matter is not as simple as just talking about housing swaps. I have tried to arrange housing swaps for constituents within the local authority, never mind outside it, and it is incredibly difficult. One party often gets cold feet and pulls out of the arrangement, for example. It is not easy to achieve at all.

That does not mean that we should do nothing about the problem, however. The point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Aberconwy (Guto Bebb) was interesting in this regard. We talk about under-occupancy figures, but we must also consider the figures for over-occupancy.

Independent Debt Advice

Debate between Lord Watts and Andrew Percy

Tuesday 8th February 2011 Westminster Hall

[Andrew Percy]

No, let me finish. If the hon. Gentleman is going to make a point, he should at least have the courtesy to listen to the response. He was part of a Government that ran up massive debts that the coalition Government must repay. Tough decisions have been made, but even when we are not necessarily happy with some of those decisions, our job as coalition Members is to come here and make it clear what we think our constituents deserve. In saying what I have, that is exactly what I have tried to do. I am trying to support exactly the point that Opposition Members have been making, which is that we need face-to-face debt advice.

[Mr Watts]

The hon. Gentleman must have come across the same sort of cases that I have as an MP, in which people have been given bad advice. My worry about training someone for one day, or even one week, is that it will not provide the level of skills required to advise people in the best possible way. Bad advice is worse than no advice at all.

Local Government Funding

Debate between Lord Watts and Andrew Percy

Monday 6th December 2010 Commons Chamber

[Andrew Percy]

I will not give way any more because I have detained the House already and do not wish to whine on for too long.

Division has been created today by the image that many Tory shire authorities around the country are about to get a windfall and are doing very nicely, whereas everybody else faces cuts. No doubt there will be the slaying of the firstborn and all the other extreme language that we have come to expect from Labour Members. Such arguments are not helpful. I represent Goole and East Riding, which have some of the most deprived communities in England. East Riding suffers from being part of a larger authority that has very wealthy areas, with the consequence that its funding settlement has been among the worst in the country for the past decade. The council has tried incredibly hard over the years.

[Mr Watts]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Andrew Percy]

No, I will not, because the hon. Gentleman has had a lot to say today.

As the hon. Member for Barrow and Furness said, large rural authorities, as well as having considerable pockets of deprivation, face other challenges that are not taken into account. One of my two authorities is the largest unitary authority in the country. It is time that we looked at the structure of the grants system and made it take account of issues of rurality. For example, we know that rural poverty is hard to identify.

If the hon. Member for Scunthorpe (Nic Dakin) speaks, I am sure that he will talk more about our Labour local authority, which seems to take a different line on the spending cuts. I will allow others to conclude whether that is for political reasons, given that there are elections next year. However, my Conservative-run authority of East Riding has accepted that it will be tough. It has made decisions to prepare for that over the past two years, because it has known that it is coming. It knew what the Labour party was saying about 25% cuts—some of the biggest cuts in history—coming its way, so it started to make decisions accordingly. Even after the comprehensive spending review, one of my local councils said clearly:

“The programme involved a carefully planned reduction in expenditure in response to anticipated funding cuts.”

The council had been planning for the cuts already. Any half-decent leader of a local authority should have had that in mind, not least because they should have seen the previous Government’s plans. It is nonsense suddenly to pretend at this late juncture that it is all wicked and terrible, that nobody could have seen this coming, and that it would not have happened in the strange world that the Labour party currently seems to inhabit.

I have highlighted some of the waste and inefficiency that I saw as a local councillor. There are some very good people working in local authorities and providing services. The challenge for local authorities is to navel gaze, to look closely at what they are doing at the moment and to decide whether they can do that better. I give way one last time.