Andrew Percy
Main Page: Andrew Percy (Conservative - Brigg and Goole)
Caroline Flint
I will give way shortly.
Grahame Lucas, the President of the Society of District Council Treasurers, said that front-loading was happening —not that it was fiction, Mr Secretary of State—and that its consequences would be disastrous. Even the Secretary of State’s Parliamentary Private Secretary, the hon. Member for Wimbledon (Stephen Hammond) knows that there is a problem. At County Councils Network conference on 22 November, he told council leaders that front-loading
“has exercised ministers for some time”.
He asked them to “wait for the settlement.” Who knows, perhaps today’s debate and the cries from their own people across the country will have an impact. Today, we are trying to tell the Government that they should listen and try to do something to avert the disaster that will happen in a few weeks’ time.
Andrew Percy (Brigg and Goole) (Con)
I thank my constituency neighbour for giving way to me. May I say gently and in the most friendly way possible, that I served on a metropolitan northern authority for 10 years and the picture was not quite as rosy? Although there might well have been some extra resources, all too often, what came with that were huge burdens that were not fully funded—whether that was free swimming, local bus passes or whatever. Local tax payers, who are some of the poorest tax payers, had to pick up the bill.
Caroline Flint
The hon. Gentleman is indeed a neighbour of mine in Yorkshire. Correct me if I am wrong, but I cannot remember that there were many Tory-controlled councils that did not want free swimming when it was being offered or that did not want a number of other benefits for their communities. However, I would have to say to the hon. Gentleman, in the nicest possible way, that if people thought it was not rosy then, they must now be in despair about what is ahead.
We are hearing from councillors of all parties that if councils are not given enough time to plan which cuts to make, they will be forced into making rushed decisions with no time to plan for the consequences, which could end up costing more than they save.
Steve Rotheram (Liverpool, Walton) (Lab)
I am delighted to have been given the opportunity to speak in this important debate as, once again, yet another announcement —this time on local government funding—will see areas such as Liverpool lose out in favour of more affluent areas of the country. I have no doubt that some Tories on the Government Benches would agree with the rich getting richer—after all, it is part of their political philosophy—but they could at least come clean about it and not try to kid us that this makes things fairer.
Steve Rotheram
Not just yet.
To hear the Secretary of State tell one of my hon. Friends not to take us back to the ’80s shows the brass neck of the man. That is exactly what Labour Members wish to stop. If he wants to know about that torrid decade of Tory rule, I would be happy to sit down with him for a few days to outline the devastation that the Tories wreaked on our great city and specifically on the people of Liverpool, Walton.
This decision on local government funding by this coalition Government will have a disproportionate effect on the area I represent. When I made my maiden speech, I warned—hon. Members can check Hansard—that I would fight against a return to the devastating Tory policies of the ’80s that nearly destroyed places such as Liverpool. That is a fight that I will not shy away from.
The Government are rapidly gaining a reputation for saying one thing and doing another, and I fear that their gung-ho approach to local government funding is yet another shameful example of the widening gulf between the coalition’s rhetoric and the harsh contradictory reality on the ground.
Andrew Percy (Brigg and Goole) (Con)
I am glad to have caught your eye, Madam Deputy Speaker, so that I can contribute to this important debate. There have been many interesting contributions, on both sides of the House, in which Members have put the case for their particular councils and areas with some passion.
Before I came to this House, I served for 10 years as a city councillor. In fact, I was exactly one half of our group on the council—I doubled its size when I arrived. However, our lack of electoral success does not mean that we were not involved closely in running the local authority. Our council was originally run by Labour and then eventually became one with no overall control, so we were heavily involved in running it for several years.
We have heard some very thoughtful speeches today, particularly from the hon. Member for Bermondsey and Old Southwark (Simon Hughes), who made some sensible and interesting points. In relation to burials, I can certainly relate to the issue that he raised about people on different sides of the same street, in some cases, paying different amounts. Anything that the Government can do to alleviate that would be greatly appreciated.
However, some of the speeches have been more about creating and enforcing divisions where they may not exist, and that has not been helpful to the debate. Neither has the scaremongering that has occurred in some cases, although that does not apply to the hon. Member for Barrow and Furness (John Woodcock), who made a sensible contribution. That approach may get headlines in local papers, but it will not do anything to protect services, or do anything for the people who work in local government, many of whom are dedicated public servants.
Karl Turner (Kingston upon Hull East) (Lab)
The hon. Gentleman referred to the contribution by the hon. Member for Bermondsey and Old Southwark (Simon Hughes); I, too, agreed with much of what he said. However, does the hon. Gentleman agree that, if the hon. Member for Bermondsey and Old Southwark had started by saying that, during the election, his party agreed with the same deficit reduction policy as mine, his words might have been more plausible?
Andrew Percy
I am not sure how I am supposed to respond to that intervention, but I suspect that it has served its purpose. However, the hon. Gentleman’s Front Benchers have told us absolutely nothing about what they intend to do. They cannot have a serious debate on any subject regarding public spending unless they come forward and say what they would do. All we know is that their plan is to protect local services. Is that still the case? If so, something else would have to be cut: is it to be schools or the health service? They have no credibility. It may get them a few cheap headlines, but it will do nothing to contribute to the debate about how we tackle the very serious deficit which this country faces.
Simon Hughes
It was unfair for the hon. Gentleman to be asked a question about what I said, so I had better give him the answer, which lies in something that he said earlier. He will know from his city council experience that when one is not running the show oneself, one has to work with others—by definition, one cannot get all one’s own way. That is fairly obvious.
Andrew Percy
Absolutely. That is what we should be doing on an issue as important as this. We should all be working together on the whole way that local government is structured to try to change it for the better.
Andrew Percy
I will give way in a moment to my train colleague; we sometimes catch the same train.
Lots of references have been made to going back to the 1980s, or to the 1970s and “Life on Mars”, but some of the contributions have been like listening to “The Twilight Zone”. In my 10 years serving as a councillor under the previous Labour Government, I seem to recall the picture not being quite as rosy as that painted by Labour Members. We have heard many comments about Conservative and Liberal councillors criticising this Government’s settlement, although we do not know what it is yet. In my 10 years on the council, Labour, Liberal and Conservative councillors tended to criticise the settlement coming forward from any Government. That is the way of local government, largely because the formulae are so complex that there is always something that one is not happy with in any settlement.
When I was a local councillor, our authority went through a number of assessments, first, through the corporate governance inspection regime, and later through the comprehensive performance assessment regime. Labour Members cannot possibly be defending the millions of pounds that went into those schemes. I will explain what those schemes did to a city council such as Hull, which at the beginning of the Labour Administration had some of the most deprived communities in the country, and still had them 13 years later. If hon. Members want to carry out a value-for-money analysis of that, I will leave it to them to do so. The decisions that we were forced to take as a result of going through the CGI process cost our city council millions of pounds over those 10 years.
The council, which was Labour-run, was judged to be a failing council. There was some fair criticism, no doubt, but I do not know whether we needed the expensive regime process that came in to tell us that the authority was not necessarily being run as it should be. One of the most appalling recommendations that followed the CGI process was that we should appoint five corporate directors, but they were not to be employed on the same salary as our previous service area directors—no, we were to employ five corporate directors on salaries of £105,000.
Justin Tomlinson
Like my hon. Friend, I served for 10 years as a councillor. I fully echo his point, given the number of times that we were encouraged, following inspections, to spend huge sums of money on members of staff just to prove that we were heading in the right direction.
Andrew Percy
I thank my hon. Friend for that intervention. This is not something that my council experienced on its own—it happened across the country, as we know.
As I said, we were expected to pay our corporate directors a salary of £105,000, which most people in the city of Hull, and indeed across east Yorkshire and northern Lincolnshire, can only dream of. Then, in time, we had to appoint a new chief executive. Needless to say, they were not appointed at the same salary as the previous chief executive—there was a massive salary increase that had a knock-on effect on other local authorities in our area, which judged themselves against how much the neighbouring authority was paying. If we cannot get people to work in local government on salaries lower than that of the Prime Minister, we are doing something badly wrong.
I also well remember the settlements that we used to get from the Labour Government—it was a case of giving with one hand and taking away with the other. Nowhere was that more clear than in the best value process, which required us to measure 100 to 200 different things and report back to central Government. One of our best value performance indicators was to measure how many of our park benches had arms. I am sorry, but when I go drinking in the Dog and Duck, or in my real pub, the Percy Arms—[Interruption.] It is conveniently named. People do not come up to me and say, “Andrew, what we want you to do as a local authority is to measure how many park benches have arms.” They want their council to be providing services—over the past couple of weeks, gritting, snow ploughing, and so on. They do not want it to be spending hundreds of thousands of pounds every year reporting back on such silly measures.
Jonathan Reynolds
Is the hon. Gentleman suggesting that local authorities should be subject to no inspection regime whatsoever?
Andrew Percy
No, that is not what I said. I am saying that local authorities should be subjected to an awful lot less inspection, and that we certainly should not be running around paying people fat salaries to go measuring how many park benches have arms. If Labour Members are seriously suggesting that they want to maintain that system, I will happily give way to the hon. Gentleman so that he can explain to my constituents why my local council should continue to do that.
We all understand that there has to be some measurement of public services, whether they are in schools, the health service or local authorities, but we have to consider the proportion of time, money and resources spent on that. Under the previous Government, it got completely out of hand—some of it was well meant, but it had unintended consequences. It was alleged at that time that money was thrown at some councils, but it was not always thrown to provide better services; often it was spent on employing more people to sit behind desks and measure things that the public would, frankly, not consider to be a priority. That is what happened in my authority in relation to councillor training. We were suddenly told, following our CGI and CPA inspections, that we had to spend more taxpayers’ money on training councillors to do the job that political parties should ensure that they can do before they stand for office. That is why I refused to undertake councillor training—perhaps that says a lot about me.
One of the most ridiculous things that was produced by our council—no doubt by somebody on a good salary—was a guide to professionally appropriate language for councillors. At great expense to the taxpayer, we were issued with a guide to tell us that we must not call women flower, duck or love. If that is considered a good use of taxpayers’ money, I am afraid that I am in a different camp.
My other recollection from the past 10 years serving as a local councillor is that, although everything was fantastic and rosy, as we have heard from Labour Members, there were considerable hikes in council tax. The last time the Labour party ran Hull city council, it raised council tax by 10%. If that is evidence of good central Government funding to some of the poorest authorities, I do not know what planet I have been living on.
There is a sensible debate to be had about local government funding, but today’s attempts to create division are unhelpful. The hon. Member for Barrow and Furness made the point that I was going to make.
Tom Blenkinsop
I thank my fellow travelling companion, on certain days, for giving way. Labour Members are not coming up with scare stories. My information comes from the independent mayor of Middlesbrough and the leader of the Tory council in Stockton. We have also heard the example of the leader of the Tory council in Barrow. Those people have legitimate fears about the Government proposals. Yet again, we hear Back Benchers saying that they are aware of the situation, while the Minister says that he does not know what figures or information we are talking about. That only perpetuates the fears. Does the hon. Gentleman appreciate that?
Andrew Percy
One of the burdens of local leadership is to take the information that is provided and decide whether to perpetuate a possible myth that would cause hundreds or thousands of people to fear for their jobs or to disseminate the information differently.
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.
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.
Justin Tomlinson
Does my hon. Friend agree that the decision to publish expenditure over £500 will allow a greater number of eyes to look over the information and identify much needed efficiency savings?
Andrew Percy
Of course I agree. That can be done relatively simply through programmes such as Oracle, which my former council spent millions of pounds investing in—perhaps investing should be in inverted commas.
Andrew Percy
I will give way because we are near neighbours and I like the hon. Gentleman.
Karl Turner
I am very grateful. I am tempted to agree with some of the points that the hon. Gentleman makes, but will he be kind enough to admit that when he was a councillor in my authority, I never heard him complaining about the grants that he received from my party in government?
Andrew Percy
The hon. Gentleman has obviously never been to a Hull city council meeting. Forgive me; after he was selected, he did come along. The first hour of most council meetings tends to be spent railing against whichever Government are in power and saying, “We haven’t got enough money. Can we have some more please?” I was no exception. I spent 10 years saying, “Wouldn’t it be nice if we could get a bit more?” The serious point is that, whenever we put forward an alternative budget, it was fully worked out and contained huge savings on such things as building rationalisation.
Andrew Percy
No, not cuts—building rationalisation. There appears to be an irregular verb: they make savings, we make cuts. Any hon. Member who believes that we can continue to fund local government at the same level as in the past couple of years is living in la-la land. Nobody with a serious agenda would suggest that.
I make one final plea to the Minister on the funding of fire authorities. I have the highest regard for the fire authority in Humberside. In the past couple of years, it has faced challenging times because of changes to legislation made by the previous Government. Although there is an acceptance that savings must be made in fire authorities, I urge the Minister to keep a close eye on them and to ensure that reductions impact on the front line as little as possible.
The message should go out to all councils that there are tough decisions to be made, but that they can be made in a way that protects front-line services if our local leaders are brave enough. Local councillors have the choice of whether to scaremonger and make political points in the run-up to next year’s local elections, or, like my well run Conservative council of East Riding, to get their heads down, get on with it, make savings, but pledge to protect services.
Karl Turner (Kingston upon Hull East) (Lab)
I am very grateful for the opportunity to speak in this debate, which is important because the subject affects my constituents particularly badly. I have enjoyed contributions from both sides of the House, and I particularly welcomed that of the hon. Member for Bradford East (Mr Ward). It reminded me of something that he said at the very beginning of the Parliament in a media interview: “It’s not about who you do the deal with, but about the deal you do”. I suspect that he is rather wondering what sort of a deal has been done now.
I also welcomed the contribution of the hon. Member for Brigg and Goole (Andrew Percy) about waste in local government, particularly when he referred to bureaucracy and the rule book on appropriate language to be used by councillors to council officers. He failed to mention that the other half of the Tory group on his council was accused recently of referring to a council officer as a “wonk” and a “foreigner”. Perhaps it would have been useful for him to have read that very rule book.
Andrew Percy
As my friend, colleague and near neighbour knows full well, the guide I referred to was for councillors in their dealings with the public. The corporate governance inspection recorded that it was Labour councillors who were bullying members of staff back in 2000.
Karl Turner
Of course, I disagree entirely. It was very recently that the leader of the Tory group was accused of the serious things I mentioned, and it would have been better had he read the rulebook.
As axes have fallen, local government has emerged as the indisputable loser from the Government’s austerity measures. Town halls across the country will feel the squeeze tighter than Whitehall Departments as the Government cynically try to devolve responsibility for the choices they have made and the mess they are creating. On average, local authorities will experience a loss of funding to the tune of 27% over four years, compared with 11% for Whitehall Departments.
Before I move on to specific objections, I should first like to discredit the myth that that situation was inevitable. It was not. There was an alternative, which, coincidentally, was the opinion of the junior partner in the coalition Government. It had the support of numerous Liberal Democrats who are now members of the Cabinet, and the Deputy Prime Minister deemed it simple enough for his 8-year-old child to understand. Slower deficit reductions—half the level over four years—as supported by the Labour party, would have mitigated the effect of local government cuts and protected the most vulnerable in our constituencies.
Cuts this size and this fast cannot be absorbed through recruitment freezes, removing natural wastage or service-sharing. Make no mistake: these cuts will impact on services and jobs. Across the country, local councils have already begun shedding staff and pulling vital front-line services. Council leaders, whatever their political persuasions, are trying to mitigate their political misfortunes, explaining that services will be hit and jobs lost, and even the Secretary of State admitted that, by itself, sharing services will not balance the books. Money allotted for highway improvement is being hit in Somerset, north Yorkshire and London, and support for battered women has been slashed in Buckinghamshire. Eligibility for social care is being tightened, £311 million of grants from the Department for Education have gone, and youth services are being put at severe risk.
In my constituency, residents have been hit particularly hard by cuts to the housing market renewal programme, affecting Hull’s gateway housing regeneration scheme. The speed at which Government funding has been withdrawn has left many living in derelict houses, experiencing damp, flooding and an increase in theft. I have written to the Secretary of State to invite him to see the result of his policies, but not surprisingly he has yet to reply. It is perhaps no wonder that he has not afforded me the courtesy of replying to my invite. My constituents are left in real desperation. Cuts to these areas do not just end with a fall in service provision. They begin a vicious cycle of their own: as jobs are lost and unemployment increases, dole queues get longer and longer. The Local Government Association has already revised up its estimates of job losses to 140,000 this year and predicts costs associated with these redundancies could be as much as £2 billion. However, money provided by central Government to help with the cost of job cutting amounts to only £200 million.
I come to the crux of the motion. It is not just the depth of the cuts that is damaging, but the speed. The Government’s desire to rush local authorities into making cuts now to make sure the damage is done well before the next election is a worrying and short-term decision based entirely on political objectives. The Secretary of State can scream from the rafters that the accusation of front-loading is fiction, but the evidence is firmly against him. The Local Government Association has estimated that the cuts will fall heaviest in the first year, with an 11% loss in 2011-12.
The Government may talk a good game, but they certainly do not play one. Let us consider, for example, the Secretary of State’s vision for local authorities. He claimed that they should use cuts as an
“opportunity to completely rethink everything they are doing, creating a modern, flexible and innovative council.”
That is certainly a laudable sentiment, but in practice he is forcing local government to make cuts almost immediately, allowing no time for planning or strategy. The opportunity that he speaks of will last for the blink of an eye.
As well as going too far, too fast, the cuts are unfair. Despite claims from Government Members that they would aim for fairness and that we are all in this together, the effect of these cuts is highly disproportionate, hitting the worse-off hardest. Even the Minister admitted:
“Those in greatest need ultimately bear the burden of paying off the debt”.—[Official Report, 10 June 2010; Vol. 511, c. 450.]
Unfortunately, figures from the Department for Communities and Local Government bear that out. The councils worst hit over the four-year settlement, including my constituency, are among the 10% most deprived areas in the country.
This Government say one thing and do another. Measures involving jobs, services, front-loading and unfairness are all being undertaken using the language of localism. The Government are front-loading cuts in local services to ensure that, come the general election, the massacre will be over. They are making councils take responsibility for the cuts locally so that they do not have to account for their irresponsibility nationally. They are feathering their own nests while pillaging constituencies such as my own. This Government claim that we are “all in this together”, so I ask the Secretary of State if he will please visit my constituency, along with housing Ministers, to see the carnage for themselves.