Local Government Finance

Andy Slaughter Excerpts

Tuesday 10th February 2015 Commons Chamber

[Kris Hopkins]

My hon. Friend speaks very wisely and he knows from his own experience that local authorities appreciate these tools we have given them to grow their finance base, and there is an incentive for them to carry this out by improving those key services and increasing the resources to those services.

For those who do not freeze the council tax, the referendums principles report laid before the House on 3 February confirms that any increase of 2% or more will require a binding referendum by the local electorate. Councils that want to increase their bills should have the courage of their convictions and seek a mandate from their electorate. It is already the case that a council tax referendum can be held at a reduced cost in 2015-16 when combined with the general election. We announced on 3 February that any savings to the Consolidated Fund as a result of a combination of a referendum with the general election will be redirected to councils, so the cost of the referendum to a local authority is low. This weakens the argument that some might make that holding a local referendum will result in excessive cost.

[Mr Andy Slaughter (Hammersmith) (Lab)]

I have no doubt the Minister will want to congratulate Hammersmith and Fulham council, which is one of eight to cut its council tax this year, but why is he rewarding it by cutting its discretionary housing payment not by 24%, which is the national average, or 35%, which is the figure for London, but by 52%? This is an area with the highest property prices and where there is family break-up with people being forced out of the area. DHP is absolutely vital. Will he look again at that cut?

[Kris Hopkins]

This Government continue to ensure there is a substantial welfare net to look after the most vulnerable individuals, and we have put additional funding into the budget. I applaud the council for reducing its council tax, however, and I would just note that it is following the trajectory given by the previous Conservative administration. That may be only a small glimmer of light, but somebody appears to have learned from the excellent previous Conservative administration.

The local government finance report 2015-16 sets out a fair settlement, which ensures councils continue to have significant spending power. Even with the savings that have been made to date, local authorities in England were expected to spend over £115 billion in the current financial year. When we factor in councils’ new responsibilities for public health, the amount local government are expected to spend is higher than it was under the last Administration.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Andy Slaughter (Hammersmith) (Lab)]

What a difference a year makes. At the time of the previous debate on the local government finance settlement, Hammersmith and Fulham had a council that after eight years was increasingly at war with its own residents on housing, planning, health, education and social care. Its decisions seemed designed not only to alienate the electorate, but, perhaps because of that, to seek to change it by socially engineering the borough so that the resident population or large parts of it were encouraged to move out, to be replaced either by the very wealthy or, in the case of the council template of buy-to-leave or safety-deposit box flats, by no one at all. There are tall, empty buildings where offshore money is simply dumped in west London and other places.

We are still dealing with the consequences, but it seems extraordinary that a park was being sold off in the most deprived area of my constituency. Where there had been free football pitches, people would now be charged £90 an hour. The Earls Court exhibition centre is, sadly, still being knocked down, despite the chronic lack of exhibition space in this country. It was going to be replaced by 1,300 luxury flats, with no affordable flats at all. Shepherds Bush market is still, I am afraid, under threat, but we are working hard to save that iconic, 100-year-old market that serves my constituents, which again was to be replaced by luxury flats. Charing Cross hospital was designated for demolition, also to be replaced by luxury flats, and a whole council estate, with thousands of council tenants and leaseholders having their homes demolished, was to make way for high-rise developments.

I do not know whether it was because of or in spite of that, Hammersmith and Fulham council was described by the Prime Minister as his favourite council and by the Secretary of State as the apple of his eye for its hard-line Thatcherite policies, whereby everything socially useful seemed to be on the demolition list and everything that gave the area identity was to be replaced by faceless blocks. The electorate, however, did not agree, and they evicted the council last May and replaced it with a Labour council. Had that new council done nothing and sat on its hands for four years, it would still have been a blessed relief for my constituents, but it has not been doing that—far from it.

In preparation for the debate, I asked the Labour leader of the council, Councillor Stephen Cowan, to give me a short list of the council’s achievements in the past nine months. The list is too long for me to read out, even in the time I have left, but I will give some examples, because it illustrates how a council takes over from the car crash that preceded it, having not only to remedy and ameliorate the policies I talked about, but to introduce positive and progressive policies of its own, in a climate of the cuts that many right hon. and hon. Members have eloquently spoken about this afternoon.

The council set up a hospitals unit to try to save Charing Cross hospital. People may ask how a council can affect that, but we have an effective hospitals campaign which is now welcomed into the town hall and supported by the council, and we are confident that, using the powers we have, we will be able to save that hospital. One of the first things the councillors did was vote through a 10% cut in their own special responsibility allowance. The second thing they did was to save Sulivan primary school, which had become a national cause célèbre. It is one of the best primary schools in the country, according to its results, and one of the most inclusive. I have a soft spot for it because I went to a school just next door to it. It was designated for demolition and closure solely to provide a site for a secondary free school. That school has been found another site, but Sulivan survived and is thriving.

Millions of pounds in new affordable housing have been negotiated; an additional £26 million has been negotiated on extant planning consents. That is not about new planning consents, where, obviously, and contrary to the previous council, we are asking for significant amounts of social and affordable housing; it is on deals that were already done. One of the most shocking things about the previous council was that it was such a poor negotiator. Whether that is because it did not really want to take money off private developers, it could not care less or it did not want, for reasons of gerrymandering, to have social housing, I do not know, but that is an extraordinary figure. It says that we can negotiate tens of millions of pounds simply by going back to the developers, even though we have, in effect, no bargaining power other than to say, “If you want to work with us in the future, you need to show you are responsible.” It is ironic that property developers are more responsible than Conservative politicians in that respect.

We also now have the largest ever number of local police funded by the council, at 44 police constables funded, which, to take up the theme of this afternoon’s previous debate, makes up in some way for the cuts Boris Johnson has made in the Met; we have had a 25% increase in voluntary sector funding, with an emphasis on homelessness and social inclusion; and we have begun the programme of turning the residential streets into 20 mph safe zones. Visitors to Hammersmith a year or so ago would have seen what we described as “North Korean-style” banners hanging from every lamppost, with pictures of smiling Conservative councillors and messages like, “Grain production up 2,000%”. By cutting those and the glossy magazines the Tories produced, we saved, at a stroke, £600,000 a year, which we can spend on essential services.

We did not get rid of the tri-borough, with the two neighbouring Tory councils, because there were some economies of scale there—so that is not an ideological point—but we did take back the decision-making powers from the tri-borough to ensure that Labour values would prevail in Hammersmith, unlike with the repeated cuts made in Kensington and in Westminster. We established an independent health commission chaired by Michael Mansfield, which is taking evidence now because the Health Secretary has refused consistently either to meet west London MPs or to review the appalling decision to close the four accident and emergency departments in west London. We cut the proposed rent rise for council tenants from 4.5% to 2.89%. We have started the process of buying back Hammersmith park, which had been sold.

We have given support to local food banks and taken action to tackle food poverty. We are challenging the Mayor of London’s right to nationalise the northern part of the borough and turn it into a development corporation for the construction of luxury housing—I will not dwell on this matter further because I have secured a debate on it on Thursday. We have saved the Lyric theatre after the Tories disastrously mismanaged the regeneration scheme, started to introduce safer and better cycling provision, given new support to the Royal British Legion, and reduced the use of management consultants. We have introduced, for the first time, speaking rights for residents at planning committees and involved residents, through commissions on issues such as the third runway at Heathrow, in leading policy decisions.

We have taken action against the disastrous special educational needs provision, particularly the transport contract, that the Tories introduced. We have introduced housing benefit advice workers in citizens advice bureaux. There is a new openness in the way in which the council does business. Nine children’s centres have been saved from planned closure. There has been action to support start-up businesses. We have trialled pedestrianisation of the North End road market, which attracted 10,000 shoppers on the day. We have blocked the Tories’ proposals to reduce trade union representation, cut meals on wheels charges by 33% and cut 15 other charges. We have halted the Tories’ plans—they did not reveal them before the election—to increase parking charges by 15% and we have frozen charges for school meals and 138 other charges.

We have abolished charges for home care for elderly and disabled people—we are only the second local authority in the country to do that. Last but not least on my list is that foster carers have been exempted from paying council tax, and we are, I think, the only council in London, and only one of eight in the country, to cut council tax. All of those things were done in the first nine months of a Labour council in Hammersmith, and they were done against a background of cuts in our budget. Ostensibly, there is a 4.7% cut in the financial settlement, but when ring-fenced budgets are taken into account, that is actually a cut of 10%. Hammersmith has received a cut of £286.16p per head, and that is despite being the 55th most deprived local authority in the country. That is the background against which these decisions are being made. I am proud of the record that a Labour council is establishing, and I know from the correspondence from my constituents that they also appreciate what is being done.

We are not out of the woods by any means. The baton, which was dropped by the previous Conservative council, has simply been picked up by the Mayor and the Government. Some very brave and courageous shopkeepers around Shepherds Bush market took three legal actions to try to save their livelihoods and their businesses. When they won the public inquiry against the compulsory purchase that the previous Conservative council had instituted, they thought—and we all thought—that we had saved the market and the shops. But then, giving no reason at all, the Secretary of State intervened and overturned the decision and said that the development should go ahead. Similarly, he agreed to the demolition of the exhibition centre at Earls Court and the 750 council homes on the site and allowed that premium land to be sold off at a substantial under-value.

Worst of all, a mayoral development corporation is to be set up—as I have said before I will not dwell on this matter as it is the subject of a Westminster Hall debate on Thursday—taking in the whole of the north of my constituency, where the Mayor of London intends to build 25,000 homes. As far as we are aware, none of those homes will be genuinely affordable or for local use. The Mayor has described it as a mini Manhattan. Is that the Conservative view of localism, so that where Conservative councils are rejected firmly and clearly by electorates they will simply find ways of pursuing their policies by other means, by taking over the land and overriding local decisions through the powers of the Secretary of State?

In my intervention earlier, I gave an example and I am sorry that the Minister was unable to answer the question that I was genuinely asking, and if the Minister who is winding up cannot deal with it I would like him to get back to me on it. The discretionary housing payment is a vital lifeline in many authorities, but in none more than in London authorities, where the combined effect of the bedroom tax, the cap on local housing allowance and the cap on benefits means that many hundreds of families now cannot afford their rent. The consequence will be that they will be forced out of London, losing their jobs, being separated from their families and having to take their kids out of school. The one lifeline they had was DHP and yet for this coming year the cut for Hammersmith and Fulham is 52%, more than double the national average of 24% and substantially above the average for the rest of London, which is 35%. How can the Minister justify that as regards that lifeline, which keeps families and communities together? It is little enough on its own but, as I say, it is just another way in which the process of social cleansing continues across west London.

It is great that we have a Labour council now and it will be great to have a Labour Mayor as well next year, but my constituents are living in the worst housing conditions I have seen for 30 years in terms of overcrowding and a lack of affordability for everybody from Generation Rent through to families in council and housing association homes. The only thing that will change that situation and build the houses they need is the election of a Labour Government in May. I pay tribute again to the Labour council for doing everything it possibly can to assure the welfare of the people of Hammersmith and Fulham. It needs that additional assistance and to work in partnership with a Government who genuinely care about everybody who lives in our inner cities, not only those who can afford to buy the tower blocks of £2 million flats that are the only answer the Conservative party seems to have to the regeneration of London.