Local Government Finance Bill

Annette Brooke Excerpts

Wednesday 31st October 2012 Commons Chamber

[Annette Brooke (Mid Dorset and North Poole) (LD)]

It is a great pleasure to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Bromley and Chislehurst (Robert Neill), who has identified some key issues that are important both generally and in relation to particular areas. I want to add to his comments on pooling and the arrangements for different types of authorities.

I represent a constituency that has district councils, a county council and a unitary authority. Indeed, Dorset’s local enterprise partnership has boundaries that encompass two unitaries, umpteen districts and the county council. It is important that we should be clear on how pooling can take place so that we can facilitate it, because I certainly see it as a driver for growth. The important point, however, is about choice. Some authorities might not want to play and although that might be a pity, the important point is that this is all about our localism agenda and putting more power into people’s hands at the lowest possible level.

[George Hollingbery]

Rather than yielding to recommendation 11 of Lord Heseltine’s report, which is that we should impose unitary authorities, is it not true that we are much more likely to get unitary-type authorities by accretion through election and localism than by imposing them from the top down? They will also last longer and be more robust.

[Annette Brooke]

I sincerely believe that the driver must come from local people at a local level. Anything imposed from above inhibits good local decision making and will inhibit growth.

I am talking about making decisions at the lowest possible level and I and, I assume, many other Members have been lobbied by the National Association of Local Councils. Of course, my hon. Friend the Member for Bromley and Chislehurst dealt with the question of the distribution of the business rates between the billing authority and the precepts but, as I understand it, town and parish councils do not come into the equation. I would be very pleased if the Minister could clarify the difference the amendments will make and how it will be possible for the billing authority to drive activity down to the local level and to town and parish councils. I happen to be attending the annual meeting of the Dorset Association of Town and Parish Councils on Saturday, so it would be helpful if I could be clear about what we pass today.

[Mr Stewart Jackson (Peterborough) (Con)]

Were we to consider devolving fiscal powers to town and parish councils, would we not also need to review their functions as a corollary? By comparison with international examples, our town and parish councils have very limited functions that are at the most micro level—they just have powers on street lights, fencing and allotments, for example. If we are going to take an holistic approach, we should perhaps consider in their entirety the functions that we expect parish and town councils to discharge.

[Annette Brooke]

There have been many innovations in some areas with the close working of councils at all levels. We want to generate a spirit of that happening at all levels, because we all know that in difficult economic circumstances parish and town councils have taken over some functions. It has happened rather naturally and sometimes it works well, such as when they have the “Links” man deal with all the weeds. It can be as simple as that, but there is a lot more scope for such working. I agree with my hon. Friend on that general principle.

Let me return to the thrust of this whole section of the Bill: the business rate retention scheme. It is incredibly important to add to the growth agenda and it is an important ingredient. It puts local decision making where it should be and provides opportunities and flexibility. I hope that with our good growth figures during the last quarter, we will all be incentivised to do the best we can for our local economies. Members of Parliament should take a leadership role and support those organisations. What an opportunity!

Finally, I believe that the Local Government Association is in favour of the retention of the local business rates, but there are of course doubts about the details. May I ask the Minister whether the LGA is fully behind the amendments? It is true that Members of the other place scrutinised the Bill extremely thoroughly. Some very good ideas came out of that scrutiny and although I totally support the thrust of the amendments, I merely seek the clarification that I have requested.

[Mr Stewart Jackson]

I apologise, Mr Deputy Speaker, for not being present at the outset of the debate. I want to make a few brief points.

Let me echo some of the points made by the hon. Member for Mid Dorset and North Poole (Annette Brooke) in her commendably succinct contribution to the debate—

--- Later in debate ---

[Helen Jones]

Indeed; my hon. Friend is exactly right. I will want to return to those issues later.

What is happening, of course, is that councils that are better off with fewer claimants can afford to subsidise the scheme, while others cannot. I have quoted Westminster, the flagship Tory local authority, and that is before we even move on to what the Government’s noble Friends in the Lords say. Last week Lord Jenkin was asked by the BBC whether there were echoes of the poll tax in this proposal. He said, “Yes, oh yes”—and after all, he should know, as he was the architect of the poll tax. When he warns the Government of the risk of backlash, they should listen, because he knows what happened last time. The late Lord Newton of Braintree—not, by anyone’s standards, a woolly liberal—is recorded as having said in the Lords last year:

“Is it sane?...I can hardly believe my ears”.—[Official Report, House of Lords, 6 October 2011; Vol. 730, c. GC377.]

These are the Government’s allies, let us remember, and if they are aware of the problems it is no wonder the Government are now thinking about a review.

The Liberal Democrats—those who are here—should listen to Lord Greaves, the architect of many of their by-election victories, who told the Lancashire Telegraph that the scheme was “disgraceful” and told the Financial Times that it was

“the poll tax all over again.”

How far have the Lib Dems fallen that the party of Lloyd George is now voting for Pickles’ poll tax?

No wonder the Government are trying to find a way out of the mess they have created. No wonder they have decided not only that a review might be a good idea but to bring in some transitional relief as well.

[Annette Brooke]

Can the hon. Lady clarify the position of Labour Front Benchers? Do they object to the principle of localising council tax benefit—the principle, and not necessarily the situation we are in—or would they prefer that the system were returned to the Department for Work and Pensions and thus centralised rather than localised?

[Helen Jones]

Labour Front Benchers believe in a fair deal for vulnerable people wherever in the country they happen to live, and we do not believe that a disabled person in Wokingham should be treated differently from a disabled person in Wigan. Our principle is that the help that someone gets should be dependent on their situation, not on where they happen to live. That is a key part of our policy. Let me say this to the hon. Lady: this is a policy designed to hit the poorest people hardest, especially the poorest people who happen to live in the poorest local authorities, which have already taken the biggest cuts in spending power, as we have seen during the passage of the Bill. Let us remember the figures. Liverpool will have lost £235 per person in spending power. In Hartlepool, the figure is £183. In Wokingham—I could not resist mentioning it just once more in the context of this Bill—it is a grand total of £1.