Angela Smith
Main Page: Angela Smith (Liberal Democrat - Penistone and Stocksbridge)
Grant Shapps
We certainly will have inspections and a basic template. The question is: how much inspection do we need? I invite any Opposition Member to explain how spending 151,000 days of officer time answering a comprehensive area assessment was of any use to local residents. Opposition Members talk about localism, but they do not get it. They talk about the principles of handing over power, but they do not understand that when—according to 2006 research—officers in town halls spend 80% of their time servicing the needs of Ministers and Whitehall and only 20% of their time looking after local residents, they no longer serve the democratic values of local people. That is not localism; what we are describing today is localism.
In these tough times it will be our goal to protect those in the greatest need—local residents and, especially, struggling families and pensioners. Under Labour, council tax more than doubled. We will work with local councils to freeze council tax for a year and, if we can afford it, for another one. Scotland has done it, with band D council tax now £290 a year less than the comparative figure south of the border. We want that to happen in England, too.
Angela Smith (Penistone and Stocksbridge) (Lab)
The right hon. Gentleman just mentioned the need to protect those most in need. Will he comment on the remarks by Blackpool’s Tory council leader, Peter Callow, who said:
“We are one of the most deprived areas in the land and we shouldn’t be singled out like this. I understand that some of the leafy lanes of Surrey and places have got away with it; well that can’t be right”?
Grant Shapps
The hon. Lady will no doubt welcome the £1 billion fund for regional assistance.
John Hemming (Birmingham, Yardley) (LD)
I congratulate the hon. Member for Wolverhampton South West (Paul Uppal) on his excellent maiden speech. I am pleased that other hon. Members share my concern about how easy the Labour party made it to defraud the electoral process. Obviously, people know in Birmingham how the Labour party stole 4,000 people’s votes in Bordesley Green ward and that 273 votes were arrested in Aston ward.
I must explain where I come from. I was a city councillor for 18 years. I believe that local government can do a lot for the communities that it serves. Local councillors from all parties have at the heart of their objectives to serve the whole community, so it is sad that we find ourselves in this situation. Let us recognise that. Part of the situation is an international problem; part of it is an exacerbation of the international problem by the failure of the Labour party. Like Germany, we should have entered this difficult situation in surplus. Instead, we have a deficit akin to that of Greece. Labour Members fail to recognise that there was a sovereign debt crisis in April across Europe. It drove up interest rates on sovereign debt for the countries with the bigger problems—the PIIGS: Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Greece and Spain. Those countries are having to make perhaps more extreme adjustments to their public sector spending than we are.
It is not unreasonable to say that the circumstances now are different from those in, say, March, and that we have to approach things in a different way. Six billion pounds is a lot of money, but it is a relatively small proportion of the deficit of £150 billion. Cuts of 25% in real terms are a lot, but 1% is a movement in the right direction. It is not a massive shift, but it is sufficient to reduce the interest rates paid on Government debt. By doing that, we do not have to make cuts as great as the Labour party would have done had it continued with its strategy, which I believe would have been derailed in any event.
Regardless of what we would like to do, we are driven down a route of making very serious economies. I do not think that people have fully recognised that. We had a debate earlier about 1.08% cuts as opposed to 1.1%. That pales into insignificance when we consider that we have to find 25% cuts in real terms, even over five years. We also have to recognise that it takes time to reorganise things.
The Opposition spokesman complained about Birmingham not spending all the money it had. Birmingham was well aware that financial difficulties were coming down the track and that spending all the money, as the Chief Secretary to the Treasury and the Labour party did—and then told us that we had no money—was not the right strategy. It is worth keeping some few millions in the cocoa tin so that when we face the difficulties after the general election we do not end up in such a mess that we say, “All the money’s gone.”
Birmingham made an initial announcement of £12 million savings. It is probably more like £20 million. Those figures can be worked out quite straightforwardly. They pale into insignificance when compared with what has to be saved over five years—£250 million to £300 million. That has to be planned now.
The hon. Member for Sheffield South East (Mr Betts) explained that we could protect adults’ and children’s services. I am sure he is aware that, of the budget of metropolitan authorities such as Birmingham and Sheffield, something like two thirds is spent on adults’ and children’s services. The schools grant goes directly to the schools. I am not sure that it will be possible to protect those services. Part of this debate has been the question, “Do we have to do this?” The answer is obviously yes. Another part of the debate is how we make cuts in an equitable manner.
Angela Smith
In Sheffield, the Lib-Dem council has followed a policy of redistributing money from deprived areas to the richer areas of the city. That pattern is now being replicated nationally. Is that fair?
John Hemming
I cannot comment on the detail of what has happened in Sheffield. I agree with the argument that deprivation has to be taken into account. There is no question about that. The idea of the pupil premium is that the money follows the individual rather than catchment areas from the national census. One of the difficulties with many of the calculations is that they have been done not on an individual basis but on a categorised basis.
The hon. Member for Sheffield South East makes a good point that if we cut the Government grant and do not look at the aggregate local government spend, that has an effect. There is an issue to be looked at there. People have asked whether we should cut 25% here, 26% there, 23% there and 27% somewhere else, or whether, given that we face such a severe problem, the same figure should be cut everywhere on a formulaic basis. I am quite tempted by the latter argument. I think that that method was used in Sweden, which faced a serious problem. It had the same sort of deficit and it went through the process of getting rid of it.
Hazel Blears (Salford and Eccles) (Lab)
I congratulate the hon. Member for Wolverhampton South West (Paul Uppal) on his maiden speech, which he delivered with grace and a sense of humour. I am delighted that he is the first Sikh Conservative Member and wish him the greatest of success. Grace and a sense of humour might well be qualities that will stand him in good stead in the coming months. I also congratulate you on taking up your position, Madam Deputy Speaker. I have no doubt that you will be a great champion of us Back Benchers.
When I came to this debate I thought, “Local government finance? It’s going to be bland, techie, full of references to area-based grant, formula grant, specific grants, ratios and numbers,” but I have been pleasantly surprised, because the debate has been lively and, on occasions, combative. That is quite right, because it shows how much all of us care about our local authorities and how important the services are to the people whom we represent. We must never forget that, behind all the technical jargon that we sometimes hear, we are talking about people who are struggling to bring up their children; people who are often trying to hang on to a job; people who are sometimes caring for their elderly parents, with the tremendous stress that that puts them under; and people who are looking constantly for work in this difficult economic climate.
Under this Tory-Liberal Democrat Government—I refuse to call it a coalition, because it is what it is, a Tory-Liberal Democrat Government—the prospects look extremely worrying. We have already had £6 billion of cuts, but the hon. Member for Birmingham, Yardley (John Hemming) said that that is not a great deal of money and does not know what we are all worried about. Well, I can tell him this: to my local authority it is a great deal of money. It is significant, but I have no doubt that further bad news is on its way, and that tremendous cuts will be made in the autumn. If they are signified by the same unfairness and north-south divide that we have already seen, Opposition Members will have a great deal to worry about. [Interruption.] I am delighted to welcome the Secretary of State, who has just taken up his seat on the Treasury Bench. I trust that he has hurried back from Bradford, and at the end of my speech I shall make a couple of remarks in which he might take a personal interest.
The Deputy Prime Minister once said that he wanted to see deep and savage cuts, and then he rowed back from that tremendously. However, he is about to have his wish fulfilled, and that is a bleak prospect. He also said:
“There will be no return to the kind of cuts we saw in the Thatcherite 1980s”;
“We’re not going to allow a great north-south divide to reappear”;
and, most interestingly of all, that
“the coalition will ensure that the cuts are fair and we will protect the poorest and the most vulnerable.”
He is wrong on all counts. He will face not only the wrath of his enraged constituents in Sheffield, quite rightly given his decision on Sheffield Forgemasters, but the anger of families throughout the country who will feel the brunt of the cuts that are made in local government services.
The Minister for Housing, the right hon. Member for Welwyn Hatfield (Grant Shapps), who opened the debate, claimed that the Government were essentially about fairness, and we heard about them wanting to hard-wire fairness into the country’s DNA. Let us straight away end that myth about fairness. Salford still has high levels of deprivation, but we are going to lose 1.1% of our budget, and Salford is of course Labour controlled. If we look at the different impact of the cuts on neighbouring Trafford, which is Tory controlled, we see just how fair those cuts are.
Compared with Trafford, Salford has double the number of people on housing benefit and council tax benefit; 3,000 more unemployed people; average earnings that are £40 a week less; and almost double the number of children in workless households. So, how is it fair for the coalition to reduce Salford’s budget by 1.1% compared with a cut of just 0.6% in Trafford? How is it fair that Salford loses £3.5 million and Trafford just £1.5 million? That cannot be fair, because we in Salford have made considerable progress since 1997. We have seen a huge fall in unemployment throughout our area, but people are still looking for jobs, and we need to get them back to work. We will not do that, however, by cutting the council’s funding to tackle worklessness. The working neighbourhoods fund—cut. The future jobs fund—cut. That is short-sighted and damaging and will crush the hopes of many young people in our communities.
Angela Smith
Will my right hon. Friend comment on the fact that the working neighbourhoods fund areas account for 71% of the reductions in incapacity benefit claimants since 2004?
Hazel Blears
My hon. Friend has made the extremely important point that despite what some Government Members have said, the working neighbourhoods fund is a long-term programme that is beginning to get results. We are seeing from the evaluation that it works in an intensive, neighbourhood-focused way and is getting people from some of the most difficult cases of intergenerational unemployment back into work. What do we see now? We see a Government who profess to want to reform the welfare system and get people back into work cutting the very programmes that can succeed in our communities.
Angela Smith (Penistone and Stocksbridge) (Lab)
This is the first opportunity I have had to congratulate you on your appointment, Mr Deputy Speaker. I congratulate also the hon. Members for Wolverhampton South West (Paul Uppal) and for Dudley South (Chris Kelly) on their confident and assured maiden speeches. I wanted to find something in common with them and my constituency, and I noted that they both support Wolverhampton Wanderers, who are managed by Mick McCarthy. He is a Barnsley lad, and I now represent a part of Barnsley—I say that in case people are not aware of where Penistone is. Mick McCarthy is known to frequent a wonderful Indian restaurant in my constituency, the Dil Raj, in Dodworth, so there is the connection, and one of which I am proud.
I, like many hon. Friends, have a background in local government. I was a councillor in Sheffield for almost 10 years, and if I learned anything in that time it was that local government is absolutely vital to the smooth, coherent running of our society. Without it, our way of life would soon deteriorate, with all our constituents suffering the consequences. However, I must tell hon. Members what the coalition Government seem intent on doing, because we now know what the big society means. It means looking after oneself and doing things for oneself; it means, “I’m all right, Jack”. Potentially and most worryingly, it means an erosion of the principle of democratic, elected accountability for the delivery of local services. That approach is based on an ideological belief in the small state; it is not the “needs must” approach that Government Members have touted in recent weeks.
My constituency straddles two metropolitan boroughs in south Yorkshire, Barnsley and Sheffield. Both have every reason to remember the last time the Tories were in government, as they suffered deeply from the unfair cuts that were imposed on south Yorkshire local authorities. Judging by the cuts that the Department for Communities and Local Government has already announced, it looks as if they have much to fear this time around. It is not as if they are poor, inefficient authorities; they are not. Barnsley metropolitan borough council is renowned for the quality of its leadership and its efficient use of resources, and for having one of the best leaders in local government, Steve Houghton. Recently, through careful financial planning, it managed to freeze council tax for old-age pensioners and to give the under-16s not only free swimming but free bus passes. I applaud Barnsley on that achievement, which is now under threat.
Sheffield city council’s efficiency has been praised for many years, or at least it was when it was Labour controlled. The Audit Commission awarded it four stars on many occasions, and, although it is right that local authorities should be as efficient as possible, the recently announced £1.65 billion of cuts to local authorities will have significant detrimental impacts on services, especially in places such as Barnsley and Sheffield. More worryingly, it very much looks as if metropolitan authorities are being asked to take a larger share of the cuts, with a reduction of £12.22 per head in those areas, compared with an average of £8.75 for English authorities as a whole. If any Government Member can tell me what is fair about that, I will be incredibly impressed. I do not think that they can.
Further analysis shows that cuts have been made disproportionately in some of the most deprived areas in the country. For instance, Blackburn is ranked at No. 5 on the scale of multiple deprivation and it sees a cut of 1.7%. Meanwhile, Calderdale, ranked at No. 107 on the scale, suffers a 0.6% cut—less than half that suffered by Blackburn. Interestingly, while shire councils see only a small cut of 0.3% in their budgets, the mets are cut, on average, by 0.9%. The right hon. Member for Tatton (Mr Osborne) says that we are all in this together, but yet again it seems that some are in it more than others. In typical Tory style, it seems that those with the least are being asked to pay the price for Tory ideology.
How will people’s lives be affected by the cuts already announced and those that will come later? In a report to be published shortly, the New Local Government Network concludes that many chief executives are saying that libraries, sports centres and street cleaning will be particularly vulnerable. Those of us with a background in local government know that all too well—we remember the last time around.
We hear from the Government Benches about the glories of decentralisation, but let me remind Government Members that in 1995 Sheffield set the budget that it wanted to set, to avoid cuts to libraries and street cleaning. It was told by the Tory Government of the time to go back and reset the budget in June that year; the budget was declared illegal. That is not what I call decentralisation.
Dan Rogerson (North Cornwall) (LD)
I hear the issues that the hon. Lady has raised, particularly on behalf of the metropolitan borough that she represents. However, does she recall her Government voting for capping motions in the last Parliament, to cap police authorities and other authorities, which were subject to her Government’s decisions to restrict the rates that they wanted to set in their areas?
Angela Smith
I do indeed remember the capping. I am with my hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield South East (Mr Betts) on this: I do not believe that capping is right. However, the situation in 1995 was incredibly desperate. By that time, we had suffered 15 or 16 years of year-on-year cuts. In the mid-1990s, there was less cash for the housing budget, in real terms, than we had had in 1979. By the time Labour came to power in ’97, there was a backlog of £1 billion in the housing budget.
I accept criticism of Labour’s record on affordable housing and new housing; I think that the previous Minister for Housing accepted it. But we had a massive backlog of disinvestment to deal with.
Angela Smith
We had 13 years, but we dealt with it and now almost every single council house in this country is up to standard.
Many chief executives are expecting a tsunami of cumulative funding cuts, with many saying that they will ramp up charges for sales, fees and services. The hon. Member for Sherwood (Mr Spencer) talked about local government bureaucracy, particularly in relation to the example of free school meals given by my hon. Friend the Member for City of Durham (Roberta Blackman-Woods). Finland manages to provide free school meals for every child from four to 19, without the bureaucracy mentioned by the hon. Gentleman. I do not accept his argument, and the cuts to free school meals pilots will not be forgotten.
The revenue cut for Barnsley is £2.75 million, a 1% cut to be put in place over a nine-month period—or, when other cuts are added, a £3.2 million cut in cash terms. However, the main focus of the cuts in Barnsley is the £1.7 million cut in the education area grant, whereby vulnerable children will be disproportionately affected. When that is coupled with a cut of £750,000 to the working neighbourhoods fund, it becomes obvious that the deprived, and those who most need help in Barnsley, are being targeted by the coalition.
Sheffield is England’s fourth largest city and ranks at No. 63 on the scale of multiple deprivation. Its cut is £6.5 million, or 1% of its budget, over nine months. This cut in funding has to be put alongside the withdrawal of £12 million of funding for the cleaning up of the Outokumpu site, the withdrawal of £12 million of funding for the redevelopment of the city centre, and the cancellation of the £80 million loan to Forgemasters, all of which mean that the coalition seems to have taken a sledgehammer to the city, making Sheffield probably one of the worst affected cities in terms of the impact of the coalition’s ideological approach to government.
If that were the end of the story, it would be bad enough, but on top of these cuts the national funding for local transport plans has been reduced by 25%, with a number of major schemes, including improvements to the road network, now being put on hold. In addition, the local integrated transport authority has indications of a 38% cut, which could mean for Barnsley a cut of £4.2 million. Government Members ought to tell me how people in Barnsley are going to get to work if their bus services and transport networks are to be so severely impacted by the cuts that are on the table. Interestingly, one of the aims of the coalition was a greener future. With cuts on this scale, there is no doubt that more people will be forced to use private cars. Even more worrying is the fact that, yet again, it will be the poor and the old, and those who cannot afford to use a car, who will suffer the most.
According to the Chancellor, this is only the beginning, with Departments being asked to make, on average, 25% cuts in their budgets as the required outcome of the comprehensive spending review. However, with spending on health and international development protected, the cuts in some Departments will have to be much larger than 25%. I started by saying how important I believe local government is. With, in some cases, cuts of about 38% being talked about, I fear very deeply that there are many things that local authorities will not be able to do in future.
Let us settle once and for all the claim that this coalition is progressive. The poor, the vulnerable and the least well-off will suffer the most as these cuts bite. As Brendan Barber has said,
“Not just the poor, but those on middle incomes will pay a heavy price for the government’s rush to close the deficit…and rising joblessness will add up to a perfect storm”.
Never mind fixing the roof while sun is shining—this coalition Government are set to trigger the perfect storm.
Nicky Morgan (Loughborough) (Con)
Thank you, Mr Deputy Speaker, for inviting me to speak in this debate. First, I join other Members in congratulating my hon. Friends the Members for Wolverhampton South West (Paul Uppal) and for Dudley South (Chris Kelly) on their very fine maiden speeches.
What we have heard from Labour Members throughout the debate has been a reinvention of the past 13 years. They have talked about a number of schemes that are desperately important, very much needed, and must be funded, many of which, I am sure, have been very welcome and have done sterling work. However, the question is: where was the money going to keep coming from? At the front of the Red Book, there is a stark chart showing that for 2010-11 Government receipts were to be about £578 billion and Government spending more than £600 billion. That is unsustainable even in the short term, and that is why this Government are having to take the very tough decisions that have been discussed at great length today.
The hon. Member for Penistone and Stocksbridge (Angela Smith) talked about decent homes funding. I would like her to explain to my local arm’s length management organisation, Charnwood Neighbourhood Housing, why it thought that it was going to be bidding for decent homes funding and then found that that money had been diverted to build more social housing. I do not disagree that more social housing may be needed, but that was another example of game changes in the middle of the year, about which Labour Members have complained so bitterly.
The hon. Member for City of Durham (Roberta Blackman-Woods) talked about free school meals. Perhaps she could explain to a constituent who recently wrote to me about this why she and her husband, who are still together, struggling on a low income, and who really need free school meals for their children, are unable to get them, while children of parents who have split up, with at least one parent certainly able to afford school meals, are getting them.
Angela Smith
May I remind the hon. Lady that the free schools meals pilot was about giving them to all children?
Nicky Morgan
That brings us back to the point that my hon. Friend the Member for Sherwood (Mr Spencer) made about bureaucratic schemes, in many of which the help is not getting to the people who actually need it.
This has been an interesting debate, and it was particularly interesting to listen to the three former Secretaries of State and the former Housing Minister on the Opposition Benches. I feel I should declare that I have never been a councillor, and I have learned a great deal about local government finance this afternoon, not least all the acronyms. I speak in this debate as a council tax payer, and I agree that local government is incredibly important. For many people who have come to my surgery so far, their experience of government comes from dealing with local government, whether through the administration of benefits, council tax, rubbish collection, social services or particularly education, the funding for which I shall come on to in a short while. The Local Government Association has said that town halls have already committed to making 4% efficiency savings this year, so they are leading the way where the former Government failed to do so.
As I mentioned in an intervention, one of the former Secretaries of State said that Labour had identified £40 billion-worth of cuts, but we do not know where those cuts were to be made. I believe that everybody in the House agrees that cuts have to be made. The former Housing Minister, the right hon. Member for Don Valley (Caroline Flint), talked about progress having stalled. I suggest to her and other hon. Members that progress stalled when the former Government ran up a deficit of £156 billion, which will lead to £70 billion of interest being paid—more than the budgets for education and many other things put together.
There has been little mention of council tax levels—although since I scribbled a note saying that, council tax has been mentioned. The level has increased, and in fact in Charnwood it more than doubled in the 13 years of the Labour Government. That has hit those on fixed incomes, particularly pensioners, very hard. I was approached by many pensioners during the election campaign who talked to me about how they were struggling to make council tax payments on a fixed income.
There has been talk this afternoon about ring-fencing. I welcome the fact that the Government have scrapped £1.7 billion of ring-fencing and got rid of the comprehensive area assessment, and that the £29 billion formula grant remains intact. Talking of the comprehensive area assessment, councils across Leicestershire used to employ 90 full-time staff to prepare 3,000 individual data items, leading to 83 inspections at a cost of £3.7 million a year. I defy any hon. Member, particularly any Opposition Member, to tell me that that could not be better spent on front-line services.
I am conscious of your exhortation not to speak for too long, Mr Deputy Speaker, but I wish to make two more points. First, we have heard a lot this afternoon about decentralisation, and I particularly welcome the Government’s first move to abolish the regional spatial strategies. That is a huge step forward and has been welcomed enormously by my constituents. They recognise that new houses need to be built, but they are incredibly concerned about where they are to be built. It is welcome that elected local councillors will make decisions about that.
I agree entirely with what the right hon. Member for Salford and Eccles (Hazel Blears) said about the need for creativity and innovation in the delivery of services. That is absolutely right, and there has been too much overlap between what central and local government do. I am sure that we all have talented councillors in our constituencies, and many Members have spoken about their local government experience. Talented councillors and staff do not need Whitehall and central Government breathing down their necks.
I am sure I am not the only Member who is happy to say that they do not want to say too much about local planning matters, particularly when they boil down to extensions here or there, and so on. I am happy, and believe it is right, to leave it to the local planning authority and planning committee members to decide on such matters. This Budget provides an opportunity to reinvigorate local authorities by allowing our local councils really to take charge of local issues. I wish to make a plea to the Government and the Minister, however. I am concerned about recent changes to legislation on the conversion of houses to HMOs—houses in multiple occupation. Although I welcome the fact that local authorities are to make decisions on that, as they know their local areas best, if they are to do so they need regulations that have teeth. In my constituency, the conversion of houses into student-occupied homes is a matter of real concern.
Total Place has been mentioned this afternoon. I am not an expert, but I know that in Leicester and Leicestershire, Total Place has been considering drug and alcohol treatment. It is a huge step forward, which is to be welcomed, and I endorse comments from hon. Members of all parties about the way in which Total Place has worked. I hope that it will continue.
The trouble with speaking late in a debate is that other hon. Members often steal one’s thunder, and my hon. Friend the Member for North West Leicestershire (Andrew Bridgen), who is no longer in his place, did that effectively when he spoke about spending on education in Leicestershire, so I will not say too much about that. However, I left the Chamber earlier to meet some schoolchildren from De Lisle school in Loughborough. When I told them that I hoped to speak in the debate, they immediately asked what I would say, and I said that I would talk about funding for education in Leicestershire. My hon. Friend the Member for North West Leicestershire pointed out that the funding gap between schools in Leicester and in Leicestershire is now £600. The trouble is that there is no difference in national pay rates for staff, so schools in Leicestershire have less to spend on other things if they rightly want to retain a decent staff-pupil ratio. They were penalised when the direct support grant was introduced because Leicestershire had topped up school funding. The difference between average funding in the country and that for our schools in Leicestershire meant that a 300-place primary school in Leicestershire would be £99,000 worse off every year. That cannot be right.
My hon. Friend the Member for North West Leicestershire also mentioned police funding. In Leicestershire, we have received £9 million less than the average in the past four years. Despite all that, Leicestershire county council still managed a four-star rating. That shows that, with good management and good political leadership from councillors, local authorities can run services to a high standard on less money than they would ideally like.
I support the amendment. The Opposition have totally reinvented and forgotten the past 13 years, and all the projects and schemes that have been mentioned. The Government are now taking tough decisions, which mean that, in several years, we can fund our services fully, and help the vulnerable and the poor who have been mentioned in today’s debate.