Andy Sawford
Main Page: Andy Sawford (Labour (Co-op) - Corby)My hon. Friend gives a very good example of how authorities can work together, and we are seeing that around the country. Another Labour authority in High Peak is sharing with Conservative-led Staffordshire Moorlands, under an arrangement set up under the Conservative administration. That is another one of many examples of authorities sharing management and sharing chief executives, and saving about £600,000 a year. That is a substantial percentage of the money for those local authorities and this is a good way forward. The transformation network and community budgets show that this can be done.
Newcastle has four times as many looked-after children as Wokingham, but because of the unfair way in which this Government have distributed the cuts, even on the Minister’s own measure of spending power per household, Newcastle will have less funding than Wokingham by the end of this Parliament. How can he tell us that that is fair?