Local Government Finances

Baroness Miller of Chilthorne Domer Excerpts

Thursday 21st March 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Miller of Chilthorne Domer (LD)]

My Lords, in my noble friend Lord Shipley’s excellent opening speech, he mentioned many of the public amenities that are now under immense threat due to this Conservative Government’s starvation of local government. These public assets—community assets—have been built, bought and improved over centuries and decades. I appreciate how lucky I was in my 15 years in local government in Somerset that we were able to plan and construct local amenities. Now, under this Government, starved of resources, local authorities will have little choice but to sacrifice these common assets, be they libraries, green spaces, public toilets or cultural centres.

As the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett of Manor Castle, just said, once amenities are gone, they are gone. She is right, and it puts me in mind of a well-known poem, written at the time of the Inclosure Acts, and just as relevant today:

“The law locks up the man or woman

Who steals the goose from off the common

But leaves the greater villain loose

Who steals the common from the goose”.

That is just what this Government are doing—they are stealing the common.

These common assets are irreplaceable, and the ones I want to highlight today are libraries. This possibly stems from my time at school and the only post I had—head librarian—led to a career in books. More importantly, libraries are a crucial element for everybody in intellectual levelling up. Nobody has put this better than Bobby Seagull, who many remember as the “University Challenge” champion who went on to become a City whizz-kid and then a maths teacher. He is, especially, a great advocate of libraries, as he explained when he came here to Parliament a while ago:

“Growing up in financially challenging conditions in an east London council estate, our library was a paradise”.


More affluent areas are more likely to still have quality libraries that remain open and well stocked, but deprived areas will suffer multiple deprivations, and libraries will be one of the first of these. The Government are consigning a generation to poorer literacy and lower academic attainment.

Libraries are popular—they have 40 million visits a year, which is more than cinema and football combined. They are one of the most popular services that councils provide. In addition to their central focus on reading and literacy, libraries support a wide range of activities, which was particularly seen during the pandemic, including digital skills, warm hubs, job clubs, and access to financial advice and support. They are the ultimate community resource, yet public library funding in the UK has fallen by more than 30% in total since 2009-10, and 800 libraries have closed. At least 32 councils are exploring very significant cuts or closures—in some cases proposing to close over 65% of their branches. I hope the Minister will not dare to suggest that such cuts are a local government choice. She knows perfectly well that local authorities now have no choice, given that central government has subjected them, year after year, to real-terms cuts.

What answer are the Government giving to the worst-affected local authorities, struggling in the face of ever-diminishing central government funding? They are saying, “Sell off your assets”. The exceptional financial support framework will allow councils involved—I use the word “allow” in inverted commas—to use capital receipts from the sale of assets or borrowing to cover their day-to-day costs of this amount. Traditionally, libraries occupy buildings at the heart of their communities, where land values are higher—making them an obvious option to cash in on short-term capital at the expense of long-term value.

The Financial Times highlighted this recently when it said:

“The UK government is now considering loosening the rules for allowing councils to sell off assets. This is bad news for everything from libraries to swimming pools, town halls to toilets”.


We really are in a disgraceful state of affairs. A later verse of the poem I quoted is just as apposite as the first:

“The poor and wretched don’t escape

If they conspire the law to break;

This must be so but they endure

Those who conspire to make the law”.

International Women’s Day

Baroness Miller of Chilthorne Domer Excerpts

Friday 10th March 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Miller of Chilthorne Domer (LD)]

My Lords, it is certainly an honour to speak in this debate and to listen to so many inspiring contributions. I will start with a tribute to a very important person who died last October: Carmen Callil, who created and founded Virago books in 1973. She was an inspiration to young women working in publishing such as me. Much more importantly, Virago has introduced generations of women to the world’s most exciting women writers, both contemporary and classic—those whose works had been allowed to lapse into obscurity, such as Willa Cather and Janet Frame, and contemporary writers such as Maya Angelou. The list would fill my entire allotted time, so I must just say thank you to Carmen Callil. She is certainly a woman to remember on International Women’s Day.

Perhaps it was the contrast from working in publishing to becoming a mother that gave me a lifelong interest in breastfeeding, the subject I will speak about. I really warmed to the comment in the excellent maiden speech of the noble Baroness, Lady Lampard, about baby sick down the jacket when in a work environment—I totally related to that.

I am talking about the subject today because the figures on women who breastfeed have plummeted during the last 40 years—and they were not great 40 years ago. That is despite all the advantages to both babies and the women who breastfeed them. I am also talking about it today because the Lancet has just published a series of studies on breastfeeding, and I would like some response from the Government to them. Today is also very exciting because Codex, established by the Food and Agriculture Organization, has concluded that it will finally open the door in being definite that infant health must trump marketing when it comes to formula promotion. Until now, the World Trade Organization has accepted challenges when Governments have tried to legislate in this area.

Let us look at some of the advantages to the baby. The milk is perfectly formulated, protects the baby against many infections, and reduces the number of hospital visits—the NHS estimates that £50 million per annum could be saved if babies were exclusively breastfed until the age of six months—and the risks of sudden infant death syndrome and of cardiovascular disease in adulthood. For women, the NHS lists the benefits as lowering the risks of ovarian and breast cancer, osteoporosis, obesity and cardiovascular disease.

In listing the advantages, I fully recognise that some babies and mothers cannot or do not take to breastfeeding. My remarks are in no way a criticism of them; it is very often hard to combine work and feeding. Physically, the baby may be tongue-tied, for which numerous studies, particularly the Channel 4 “Dispatches” investigation in 2018, have identified that there is a lack of health professional support. Tongue-tied babies may not be spotted, and this is not conducive to being able to breastfeed. Also, mothers who have had caesareans or very hard labours may find that milk does not come as easily. However, given the very clear health advantages, most of which have been known for decades, why has the UK suffered such a dramatic decline in support for mothers who wish to breastfeed?

Although 68% of mothers start breastfeeding after birth, by 12 weeks the number has fallen to 17%. By the time babies are six months old, only 1% are exclusively breastfed. We need to look at the reasons for this. That lack of support for breastfeeding mothers is one, but the other is the relentless marketing of baby formula from the manufacturers. I cannot do better than quote from the Lancet study from February:

“This three-paper Series outlines the multifaceted and highly effective strategies used by commercial formula manufacturers to target parents, health-care professionals, and policy-makers. The industry’s dubious marketing practices—in breach of the breastfeeding Code”,


to which the UK Government signed up in 1981,

“are compounded by lobbying of governments”.


Can the Minister undertake that this lobbying will no longer be listened to? Can she assure us that breastfeeding will be strongly promoted by this Government? Will her Government put some political welly behind the effort to put the health of our babies and mothers at the heart of policy?

Queen’s Speech

Baroness Miller of Chilthorne Domer Excerpts

Monday 17th May 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Miller of Chilthorne Domer (LD) [V]]

My Lords, it is always a tremendous pleasure to hear the noble Baroness, Lady Boycott, speak. It is a particular pleasure to be able to follow her, because she speaks from such a depth of knowledge and has such good practical sense. I associate myself with all her remarks today.

I will touch on three Bills in my short contribution. First, I will welcome, when it gets here, the Environment Bill. It is long overdue and has many important provisions and powers. It also, however, has some notable gaps and I will mention just one. It talks of public enjoyment of green space, but there is no actual provision of it in either the Bill or the planning White Paper. There needs to be a duty to create new public green spaces, especially in urban areas. The value of parks has been well highlighted by the pandemic as a necessity for physical and mental health, but it goes deeper than that. A good town or city plan must include green space.

The press release accompanying the planning White Paper merely says:

“Valued green spaces will be protected for future generations”—


in other words, those spaces that already exist—

“by allowing for more building on brownfield land and all new streets to be tree lined”.

However, the planning Bill must make powers and provision for new parks, playgrounds, sports fields, greens and allotments. The fact is that developers will get money for all of the new houses, but unless there is a requirement on them to provide green spaces, they simply will not do it. That needs to be firmly written into the Bill.

Let me take the example of allotments. Sadly, since the Allotments Act 1925 was repealed, waiting lists for allotments in most towns and cities have become longer and longer. Waiting lists of up to 400 people are not uncommon. One member of the National Allotment Society put it vividly when he said, “We will get a burial plot sooner than an allotment.” The pandemic accelerated the demand and, with the combination of healthy outdoor activity, local fresh food production, communities strengthened through shared interests and even biodiversity improvements, allotment provision should surely be a No. 1 issue for new-build areas. The definition of infrastructure for levy purposes must therefore include green spaces of all kinds.

I thoroughly agree with my noble friend Lady Pinnock, who made a powerful speech on this issue, and the noble Lord, Lord Kerslake, that it looks like the planning Bill will cut local people out from being able to make representations on individual developments. They might be able to make representations on the overall local plan, but that is far from the same thing. There will be storms of protest when people realise what this Government have done to their rights.

I must mention how astonishingly crafty, or misguided, is the section on protests in the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill. “Kill the Bill” protests have already shown the strength of feeling against this part of the Bill, and young people especially are right to fear for the future of our democracy. As the effects of the lack of democracy begin to bite—I just mentioned the example in the planning Bill—I imagine that protests will spread to Tory heartlands and across all age groups. Freedom of speech and assembly and freedom to protest have always been at the heart of British democracy, but now this Government are seriously proposing to hand to the police the authority to decide which protests can go ahead and which cannot. I am not sure that this is a power that the police even want to have.

It is clear that for a protest to be effective, it needs to be noisy and, often, disruptive. However, there are already many laws and safeguards to ensure that a protest cannot be violent or disruptive, and if it is, it is already against the law. I urge the Government to rethink this part of that Bill, because it will come back to bite them. In some ways, of course, I hope it does. However, we as a House have a duty to make sure that we remove this provision from the Bill.

Inclusive Society

Baroness Miller of Chilthorne Domer Excerpts

Wednesday 14th April 2021 Grand Committee

[Baroness Miller of Chilthorne Domer (LD) [V]]

My Lords, one of the results of the pandemic is that an already very poor literacy rate in schools will have worsened further. Adults with poor literacy skills are more likely to be unemployed or in low-paid jobs and there is a link between low levels of literacy and shorter life expectancy, depression and obesity. Nine million adults in the UK are functionally illiterate.

All my younger working life was involved with the book trade, publishing and bookselling. Books were fundamental to my world, so it came as a shock when, in my 20s, I began to realise just how many adults could not read. For some time, I volunteered for what is now the excellent National Literacy Trust. As I got to know my students, it shocked me just how excluded from normal everyday life they were. Illiteracy equals exclusion.

The underinvestment in our libraries is a national disgrace. Funding for public libraries has fallen so much in a decade, from £1 billion in 2009 to under £750 million 10 years later—so it has fallen by a quarter. Before the Minister blames local government for those cuts, let us remember that central government has cut funding for local government at a lethal rate. Let us also remember that the public libraries Act 1964 requires central government to oversee and improve public library services. The cuts have meant public libraries having a quarter less books to lend, fewer professional staff and fewer libraries.

School libraries are extremely important in getting children interested in books and reading. The Sunday Times recently revealed that 2,000 pupils are set to enter secondary school unable to read properly, so I really welcome the UK Children’s Laureate’s campaign. Cressida Cowell is the Children’s Laureate at the moment, and it was previously Michael Rosen—who is also working on this campaign and, of course, has had very severe Covid—Michael Morpurgo and Jacqueline Wilson. They are all campaigning to get the Government to commit £100 million to restore and refurbish primary school libraries, because literacy is the surest way to build the foundations our children need to develop their knowledge and imagination and to grow a brighter future.

OECD research found that childhood reading ability was a more certain predictor of future success than a family’s socioeconomic status—in other words, it is the key. Children’s literacy is the key to inclusion throughout their life. Literacy is not a cost to the economy or a luxury to be considered when times are good; it is the key to inclusion and a fundamental part of personal achievement and national economic success.

[The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Lord McNicol of West Kilbride) (Lab)]

I am glad that we could make that work. I now call the noble Lord, Lord Jones.