Bill Esterson
Main Page: Bill Esterson (Labour - Sefton Central)Local Government Finance
Bill Esterson Excerpts(12 years, 9 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text
Grant Shapps
I will give way in a moment, but I wanted to make the point that Labour Members have opposed £675 million to keep council tax bills down this year. That will give hard-working families a helping hand. That is real help now, as someone once said from this Dispatch Box.
Hilary Benn
My hon. Friend makes that point very forcefully. I wonder whether Hammersmith and Fulham will still be the Secretary of State’s favourite council once he becomes aware of what it has been doing, in marked contrast to what the Prime Minister of the party it supports said at the time of the election—but then that is sadly familiar, too.
We cannot get much more front line than making sure old people have a hot meal every day or get their shopping done, or helping people to remain in their own home by building a ramp or putting a shower on the ground floor, so whatever the Minister of State was thinking when he answered an earlier question, or whatever the Secretary of State was thinking in December when he described the draft settlement as
“enough to safeguard the most vulnerable, protect taxpayers’ interests and the front-line services they rely on”,
I would gently say to them that they must recognise the damage that such comments do to the credibility of DCLG Ministers. Every time they say such things councillors, officers and people in local communities look at each other and ask, “Don’t they have any idea of what is actually going on in the world we have to live in?”
Bill Esterson
My right hon. Friend talks about the damage being done and the reality on the ground, and that is precisely what my constituents are concerned about. They are concerned about the damage to services that my right hon. Friend has described. All that he has said is true in Sefton, which faces a 25% cut, in common with many other metropolitan boroughs.
Bill Esterson
I thank the Minister for that correction. Sefton also faces the impact of the associated job losses on local businesses that rely on the public sector, as well as the impact of the localisation of business rates. The local economy will suffer greatly as a result of the money taken out of it due to the local government cuts. Businesses will not be in a position to expand. They will also be contracting, and the council will not be able to take advantage of the changes in business rates. That will be disastrous for everybody in Sefton.
Hilary Benn
My hon. Friend makes an extremely powerful point about the impact of all this on the overall economy, and I shall say a few words about the effect on jobs shortly.
The Institute for Fiscal Studies reports on another area that has been affected. It says that significant reductions in expenditure on planning and economic development are being seen. Councils will need as much resource as possible to respond to the national planning policy framework, and in particular to draw up their new plans if they have not got them, or to revise the plans if they have got them, because if they do not do that, developers can come in and say, “We want to make use of the presumption in favour of sustainable development.” However, they will find that the resource they need to do that work will largely have disappeared.
I am reluctant to raise this point, but I shall: it is extraordinary that although the Minister stands up and says, “Money’s very tight,” his Secretary of State has found £0.25 billion to try to persuade councils to change their minds about how to collect their rubbish. The great localist thinks he knows better than they do how it should be done, even though household recycling rates have more than doubled since 1997, thus saving residents a lot of money in landfill levy, and the majority of councils whose minds he is trying to change with his cash are controlled by councillors from his own party. It is a very expensive family disagreement.
Helen Jones (Warrington North) (Lab)
We have heard numerous examples of the damage being inflicted on local communities by the Government’s slash and burn approach to local authority spending. It has inflicted on councils larger cuts than any Government Department has taken, without planning or looking at the effect on individuals, and even without any thought of the longer-term economic consequences.
My hon. Friends have highlighted the situation very well. My hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield South East (Mr Betts) talked about front-loading of the cuts making it impossible to plan, and the uncertainty local councils face. My hon. Friend the Member for North Tyneside (Mrs Glindon) gave powerful examples of what is happening, and talked about the cuts in school food provision and the increase in home care charges. My hon. Friend the Member for North Durham (Mr Jones) talked about the injustice of the cuts to front-line services in his area, and my right hon. Friend the Member for Knowsley (Mr Howarth), speaking for one of the most deprived authorities in the country, highlighted how the cuts are being inflicted on the poorest communities. All have shown how people are having to live with the harsh realities of life under this Government.
Of course, the Government, far from trying to hide the fact that they are hitting the poorest most, are quite up-front about it. The Under-Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, the hon. Member for Bromley and Chislehurst (Robert Neill), in a quote he should be reminded of again and again, said:
“Those in greatest need ultimately bear the burden of paying off the debt”.—[Official Report, 10 June 2010; Vol. 511, c. 450.]
That’s it then—not the bankers, not the millionaires in the Cabinet; the poorest pay the price. Same old Tories, and, apart from the hon. Member for Portsmouth South (Mr Hancock), same old Lib Dems: always telling us they are going to do “something”—we know not what—and then trooping through the Lobby desperate to hang on to their chance of a ministerial car. It is said that it profits a man nothing to give his soul for the whole world—but for a Honda Civic? Really! Once again, we see the poorest paying the price and, in the second year of this settlement, the damage being inflicted on the most vulnerable people.
As my hon. Friend the Member for Denton and Reddish (Andrew Gwynne) reminded us, the Government began with cuts in the working neighbourhoods fund and the Supporting People grant, which helped 1 million people, including victims of domestic violence and people with mental health problems. The Government have gone on to entrench that unfairness in the system and so we see, for example, that by the end of the two-year period Liverpool will have lost £235 per person in spending power, Manchester’s figure will be £186, Birmingham’s will be £155 and Nottingham’s will be £147. Those are the cities that the Government say are going to lead our economic revival. It is not even a case of one half of the Government not knowing what the other half is doing, because one half of the Department does not know what the other half of the Department is doing either.
Let us have a look at what happens in other authority areas. Wokingham council, our favourite authority, actually gains overall from this settlement. Dorset, taken as a whole, has a cut of 10p per person, while the figure for Richmond upon Thames is 80p and the figure for the Windsor and Maidenhead authority is a massive, by its standards, £2.20. What do many of those authorities have in common? They contain the constituencies of Cabinet Ministers. Does that not make nonsense of this statement from the Deputy Prime Minister:
“Our core aim is to hard-wire fairness back into national life”?
Tell that to the people who have lost their Sure Start programmes, and to the elderly people and disabled people who are paying more for home care or who are not getting that care at all because the eligibility criteria have changed.
Helen Jones
My hon. Friend will have to forgive me for not giving way, but we are short on time.
Tell that to the people whose community centres, libraries and day centres have closed. The truth, which Government Members have to face, is very simple: people who are wealthy can buy themselves out of those cuts, because they can pay for care and buy their books, but the people the cuts hit most are those who cannot do that. I am talking about the people who have paid their taxes all their life and then find that they cannot get care in their old age and that their sons and daughters are caught between trying to look after them, to work and to look after their children. I am talking about the families on low wages who go out to work every day and want their children to get on but cannot afford to buy all the books they would like and are dependent on their libraries. [Interruption.] I hear the muttering from the Parliamentary Private Secretaries and I know that the Tories are going to say, “We do not do this because we want to, but because we have to.” Let us start nailing that myth, shall we?
In the year from autumn 2009 to autumn 2010 the economy grew at 3.9% and unemployment was falling. So successful have the Tories been that the economy is now in negative growth, the level of unemployment is nearly 2.7 million and, scandalously, one in five of our young people is unemployed—and borrowing is increasing. The Government’s approach has not worked. They could, of course, have worked with local authorities on long-term savings and they could have assisted local authorities to use their spending power to help tackle those problems. Before they started their cuts, the local authority procurement budget was £34.2 billion, most of which was spent with small and medium-sized firms. Councils such as Tameside—it did this through its Tameside investment project—were using their purchasing power not only to build new schools, but to assist local firms; it put £15 million into local companies.