Andrea Leadsom
Main Page: Andrea Leadsom (Conservative - South Northamptonshire)
Grant Shapps
The right hon. Lady will share the concern that I had at turning up at a Ministry and being told that the £1.5 billion that had been presented to the Building Britain’s Future fund exactly a year ago, in July 2009 when programmes such as Kickstart were announced, just did not exist. We are now having to do what we can to support those important programmes. She can expect to hear further announcements on this front.
Andrea Leadsom (South Northamptonshire) (Con)
If all the programmes that the Opposition are concerned that we will cut were so valuable, why were so few houses built under the last Administration? Why are there 1 million people not in education, employment or training—NEETs—in this country if the programmes were working so well?
Grant Shapps
I am grateful to my hon. Friend, not least because of what happened in the debate on housing here just last week. The Opposition claim to be passionately interested in housing, but there was nobody at all on the Opposition Benches then: not a single Opposition Member turned up for a debate on a subject that they claim to care about so passionately.
Perhaps the answer lies in the figures on housing. We have only to look at the figures for house building last year, for example: fewer homes were built than during any peacetime period since 1924. It is not as if the top-down approach was working; the more the previous Government tried to centralise, dictate and impose housing on local communities, the fewer homes were built. That is why we intend to turn their policy on its head and ensure that in future incentives drive house performance and house building in this country.
Michael Ellis (Northampton North) (Con)
Perhaps we could inject a dose of reality into the debate at this late stage. Listening to speeches by Labour Members, I could not help but be struck by the old adage, which they have obviously forgotten, that “You can’t spend what you don’t have.” Interestingly, Labour members have clearly adopted the posture of collective amnesia when it comes to why this country is in this financial state and this economic mess, and why substantial savings are necessary in the Budget: it is because of their mismanagement of our economy. Why is it that of every £4 spent in this country, £1 is borrowed? How prudent is that? Why is it that 1 million nursing hours a week are spent on paperwork? It is because of Labour. Why are there as many managers in the national health service as there are beds? It is because of Labour. Why is it that the police spend 22% of their time on paperwork and only 14% on patrol? It is because of mismanagement by Labour.
Labour had 13 years to make the so-called improvements that it now claims we ought to make. Why did it not make those improvements? With the greatest respect, Labour Members are suffering from what can be called ostrich syndrome. They are sticking their heads in the sand, but the problem is that their hindquarters are still exposed. The hindquarters of this ostrich are there for all to see. It is disrespectful to the electorate to think that they are not intelligent enough to know why we are in this position. Why else did Labour achieve only 29% of the vote in last month’s general election—its lowest in quite some time? The electorate can see who is responsible for the state of the nation’s economy—Labour.
Speakers today and yesterday have railed against threatened cuts and savings, but these are Labour cuts. All day, public bodies have been cited and lists of endangered services highlighted, but Labour Members have made no acknowledgement of who pays for them—the taxpayer—and no suggestions about what Labour would do in respect of the cuts that are so obviously necessary. After all, we hear from some of them that billions of pounds of cuts are necessary and would have been necessary had we been in the unfortunate but highly unlikely circumstance of a Labour victory last month. Again, however, there is no collective memory of these issues.
Labour’s tax-and-spend policies ended on such an irresponsible note that its Ministers were making spending commitments in the dying weeks of the last Administration which the country simply could not afford. “Grossly irresponsible” is not a sufficient phrase. Those outside this place who were led up the garden path by Labour will realise that when programmes have to be cut, these are Labour cuts. Labour acted like a tenant who has fallen out with their landlord and decided in the last few weeks of their tenancy to spend as much as possible on utilities and then do a runner on the last month’s tenancy arrangement.
In common with a number of largely rural shire counties, which have been spoken of with some disrespect by Labour Members today, Northamptonshire residents suffered severe prejudice in terms of central Government funding during the 13 years of the Labour Government. Strangely, this phenomenon was not evident in Labour-held or Labour-marginal areas over those 13 years. The funding that Northamptonshire receives is based on out-of-date statistics calculating our population at several tens of thousands—about 10%—less than the reality. In a county whose population has been increasing exponentially—Northamptonshire is the fastest growing county in the country—the use by central Government of these seriously out-of-date figures under the Labour regime has had an unfair effect on Northamptonshire.
No doubt Conservative Ministers will be looking at these figures in due course, but I want to emphasise the point. I spoke this morning to the leader of Northamptonshire county council, who confirmed that Northamptonshire is the fastest growing county in the United Kingdom. The Office for National Statistics’ figures are two years out of date. More than 10,000 more people live in Northamptonshire than the statisticians think, and of course those people use Northamptonshire schools, bin collections and the like. This imbalance between the fastest growing county and our underfunding costs the county £5 million a year—the equivalent of 2% on council tax. Yet Northamptonshire has the lowest council tax in the United Kingdom—£30 a year lower, at band D, than the second lowest placed.
Local government finance accounts for 25% of the budget, so what needs to happen? Well, there needs to be decentralisation, and I am delighted to see that the coalition Government are already moving in that direction. There needs also to be an end to the obsessive red tape that Labour Members have created—the bureaucracy, the extreme state control—and there also needs to be an end to the top-down diktats. We need the axing of unelected and ineffective quangos, while radical reform of the planning system is also necessary to give neighbourhoods far more power to determine the shape of the places in which their inhabitants live.
In Northampton North, the constituency that I have the honour to represent, there have been examples—one in particular in the Booth Rise area—of how we have suffered under the Labour Government’s style of planning regime. Despite opposition from local residents, from the local councils, from the planning committee on the borough council and from Members of Parliament—including my Labour predecessor, I might add—a decision was taken to build 111 compact homes on green-belt land in a gateway area to the town where traffic is already heavy. That was pushed through by a Labour-created quango. Around the country, people are left feeling entirely disconnected from the powers that make these decisions.
Michael Ellis
I will not, forgive me; Mr Deputy Speaker has indicated that we are in a rush.
In conclusion, we need to introduce new powers to help local communities to save facilities and services threatened with closure, giving communities the right to take over local state-run services. We need to cut the red tape and look with reality, unlike Labour Members, at what needs to be done to improve this country’s economy and to improve the state of democracy for our local people and their elected representatives.