Local Government Finance (England)
Debate between Lord Watts and Hilary Benn(11 years, 10 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text
Hilary Benn
I very much hope that the Secretary of State is willing to accept that challenge; it would be good for him to see impact of the cuts.
Hilary Benn
I am grateful to my hon. Friend for reminding us. I do not know whether the Secretary of State will indicate whether he will accept the kind invitation he has received. There is no answer at the moment, but perhaps my hon. Friend the Member for Liverpool, Walton (Steve Rotheram) will find out subsequently.
One of the problems councils face is that there is some uncertainty in the system, because of the big change the Government are bringing in as a result of this statement. The truth is that it remains to be seen how local authorities will benefit from business rates localisation, particularly because the Government have given themselves so many ways in which they can take some of that growth in business rates for themselves. The business rate projection for each local authority has been averaged out over two years. Why did the Minister decide on a two-year period, rather than averaging out over a five-year period as his own consultation suggested?
On business rate appeals, although the Government have increased the adjustment of that to £593 million, will the Minister say whether he is confident that that will be sufficient given that the LGA says that appeals in the pipeline could be considerably larger than this, thus exposing local government to an unacceptable level of risk? Why did Ministers change the 2012-13 baseline to include cuts that would not take place until the next financial year? Was it to try to make the reductions in spending power look less than they actually were? I welcome the increased allocation for the public health grant, but because it is ring-fenced it does not really change the reduction being imposed on councils for all the other services for which they are responsible.
Finally—a lot of other Members want to speak—I turn to council tax benefit. Last year in this debate, I suggested to Government Members that they take a long, hard look at what this would mean for their constituents, including in areas where the proportion of pensioners was higher than average. Now that the change is almost upon us, many people in all our constituencies frankly have no idea what the coalition Government have in store for them.
Local Government Finance
Debate between Lord Watts and Hilary Benn(12 years, 10 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text
Hilary Benn
My response to the right hon. Gentleman is that we would not cut so far and so fast, as he knows. We would certainly not have distributed the cuts in the fundamentally unfair way that this Government have done.
Mr Watts
Government Members suggest that just one or two deprived councils are being hit the hardest, but the document by SIGOMA—the special interest group of municipal authorities—shows that the vast majority, if not all, of the most deprived authorities are being hit the worst, while those in the most affluent areas, often represented by Conservative Members, are in some cases receiving more grant.
Hilary Benn
My hon. Friend is absolutely right, and he anticipates some of the figures I am going to give to the House.
First, however, it is important to note that the Secretary of State lost out to the Treasury—assuming, of course, that he tried to protect local councils in the first place, and there many who would doubt whether he put up much of a fight, given the glee with which he regularly attacks councils for what they do. The consequences of all this are: one, that local government has to deal with cuts that are unfairly distributed; two, that residents are having to come face to face with the consequences of those cuts, as services they rely on change or go; and, three, looking to next year, that councils face nothing but uncertainty about their future financial position. Let me deal with each of those in turn.
Despite the Secretary of State’s claim that what he has done is fair and sustainable, the House knows that the 10% most deprived upper-tier authorities are facing a reduction in their spending power that is nearly four times greater than that faced by the 10% least deprived authorities. That is why the Minister’s argument falls at the very first hurdle. It is also undermined by his Department’s figures.
Newcastle city council has done us all a very great service by laying out the facts. It looked at data taken from the Department for Communities and Local Government showing the cuts in 2010-11, 2011-12 and 2012-13, taking account of transition and council tax freeze grants and the provisional new homes bonus allocations. What do the figures show when all that is taken into account? Basingstoke and Deane will gain—I stress, gain—£6 a person overall, while Knowsley will lose £227 per person. East Dorset gains £3 a resident, while Manchester loses £186. In Greater London, everyone loses, but some lose much more than others. The borough of Richmond is down by £2 a head, whereas Hackney is hit by a whacking great loss of £234 a head. Why is that? Those are the raw figures behind the hard-faced politics that prove that the Chancellor is trying to balance the budget on the backs of the poor.
If Ministers do not like hearing the truth from Newcastle or from their own statistics, what about hearing it from the independent Institute for Fiscal Studies? Its analysis by region shows that London and the north of England have been especially badly hit. Every year it publishes the green budget before the real Budget, and the 2012 green budget shows that overall cuts in local government spending, excluding education, are largest in both absolute and proportional terms in London, the north-east and the north-west.
Hilary Benn
The right hon. Gentleman obviously did not listen carefully enough to the point I made. If he has not seen the figures produced by Newcastle city council he should do so, because it has looked at the impact of the cuts over three years and has taken account of transition grant and the new homes bonus allocation. In other words, it has looked at the total effect on those authorities of all the decisions the Government have taken, and that is what the figures show.
In relation to the fire service, there are brigade areas with a very high rate of incidents, such as Merseyside, Cleveland, Greater Manchester and West Midlands. What is happening to them? They are all facing reductions in funding per head, whereas areas with a lower rate of incidence, thank goodness, such as Hampshire, Royal Berkshire, and Hereford and Worcester, will get increases in their funding per head for the fire service. What that means for the losers is that fire stations are closing, pumps are going and firefighters are losing their jobs.
Mr Watts
Is my right hon. Friend aware that the most efficient fire authorities are in the metropolitan areas, and that they are the ones that are losing the most money? I thought that this Government wanted to incentivise local authorities and fire services to become more efficient, but that does not seem to be the case.
Hilary Benn
My hon. Friend is right. Certainly the West Yorkshire fire service does an extremely good job in meeting the needs of all our constituents.
Worse is to come if Ministers insist on proceeding with the cuts that they have planned for years 3 and 4. As the Minister will know, the metropolitan fire chiefs have been so worried about the prospect that they have given Ministers a stark warning in their response to the review, in which they say:
“The Mets have already shouldered 62% of the cuts in the English fire and rescue service outside London in the first two years…The cuts planned for years 3 and 4 are unsustainable and would lead to life threatening reductions in fire cover and national resilience capacity”.
Unless the Minister has a very good answer to that, he ought to reconsider his plans for the cuts in years 3 and 4.
Last year the Local Government Association warned that the consequences of the cuts in local government finance would be felt in front-line services, although—the Minister made this point—many councils have rationalised back-office services and cut costs. The approach of the Secretary of State and the Minister is to blame councils for all this, claiming that front-line cuts are not necessary. I was interested to read what the Minister told the Select Committee back in 2010, when he was questioned by its Chair, my hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield South East (Mr Betts). My hon. Friend put this to him:
“So the bottom line from your point of view, then, as a ministerial team, is that there is no need for any cuts in services in local government at all.”
The Minister replied:
“No, they shouldn’t be cutting the front-line services.”
Only a group of Ministers who were completely divorced from what was going on in the real world in local government could say such a thing in public. We know, however, that in private some of them have said something rather different. Last year the Under-Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, the hon. Member for Hazel Grove (Andrew Stunell) wrote to fellow Liberal Democrats—[Hon. Members: “Where is he?”] He cannot be locked in the Division Lobby this time, but it would have been nice to see him here. In his letter, he described the local government settlement as “very disappointing”. A year ago, Liberal Democrat councillors published a letter in The Times in which they said that local government was
“being let done by the Communities and Local Government Secretary”.
Even a good friend of the Secretary of State and the Minister, the much respected Baroness Eaton, accused Ministers of being
“detached from the reality councils are dealing with”.