Brandon Lewis
Main Page: Brandon Lewis (Conservative - Great Yarmouth)
Grant Shapps
My hon. Friend is absolutely right. The simple truth is that Labour Members still have not understood the depth of the problems that they have got us into. Until they acknowledge that and start to address it themselves with some real plans, and identify where some of the money is coming from, nobody will take seriously their complaining and calling of Opposition day debates about this subject.
We will continue to remove the ring fences from non-school revenue and capital funding. This year, we have de-ring-fenced £1.2 billion, and we intend to go a lot further. This gives councils the extra flexibility they need to concentrate on local priorities and to protect these front-line services. We are also reducing the management burden imposed on local authorities from the centre, cutting down on undemocratic and unaccountable quangos, and putting local government front and centre in meeting local residents’ needs. When we took over, there were 27 different quangos relating to the Department for Communities and Local Government. Again, I invite the shadow Secretary of State to come to the Dispatch Box and explain how he was going to hand power back to local people by removing even one of his 27 quangos.
As with every profession, local authorities will need to take some difficult decisions about how to prioritise their spending. Local authorities have already made great strides in achieving efficiencies, but they need to do more. There is still a lot more potential to gain through new practices—for example, shared services, joint working and smarter procurement. Perhaps most important, however, will be radical town hall transformation. We must be clear that councils will need to build in improved productivity as a matter of course. They need to learn from the best commercial practices. Sainsbury’s does not go out and tell people that good food costs more when it comes from Sainsbury’s, but that it costs less, and public services are going to have to do the same thing. In the public services, in future, we have to get more for less. I know that that is a concept that Labour Members struggle with, but it is the reality of the financial mess that they have left us in.
Brandon Lewis (Great Yarmouth) (Con)
I am proud that in Great Yarmouth our council, which faces a 2% cut, has reacted by saying, “We can deal with this. We realise the situation that the previous Government has left us with, and we’ve got to get more efficiencies.” That is a good and positive move forward. In my view, having spent many years as a councillor and council leader, the best thing for our councils is to get rid of some of the ring-fencing and the tick-box culture that wastes officers’ and members’ time and give them back the ability to make real decisions about real things locally, which means they are more accountable and that our residents will care more about what they do. Does the Minister agree?
Grant Shapps
I am most grateful to my hon. Friend, who gives us an opportunity to talk about matters such as the comprehensive area assessments, which somehow, through ticking boxes and using—[Interruption.] The hon. Member for Hammersmith (Mr Slaughter) says from a sedentary position that we have done all that, but the truth is that £39 million was still being spent on that budget on the day we entered office.
Rather than having a tick-box culture, in which town halls are answerable to Ministers, there is a better way, and it is the one that my hon. Friend the Member for Great Yarmouth (Brandon Lewis) has identified—local people being the ones to whom officers are answerable, through the ballot box. That is a radical concept that can be expanded much further by allowing councils, by the end of this year, to publish online details of all their spending, tenders and contracts over £500. That will be proper transparency and empower a new army of armchair auditors to go through local authorities’ books and help identify wasteful spending, helping to protect front-line services. [Interruption.] I hear Opposition Members calling out, “Well, that will help.” As a matter of fact, we really do think that it will help in a dramatic way, and I will explain why.
We are going to extend the idea to national Government with a higher limit of £25,000, and this is how it will work. In my Department alone, openness and publishing this stuff online would have avoided, for example, the scandal of £134,000 being spent on 28 luxury socialist-red sofas by a Parisian designer, Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec, which were bought as part of new Labour’s—get this—efficiency initiative. That pretty much sums up its approach.
Transparency would, I imagine, also have stopped the scandal of my Department spending £73,000 on a serene green tranquillity room for stressed-out staff and Ministers to
“relax and refuel in a natural ebb and flow.”
Proper accountability would surely have stopped the £6,000-apiece deluxe chrome coffee machines fitted at each of the white elephant regional fire control rooms, which are completely empty, by the way. Come hell or high water, we would at least have known in future that officials would have had a nice cup of cappuccino even as disaster struck and the phone system failed, as it famously does in those buildings. That is what transparency and openness will deliver—it will mean that people can see what is going on inside government, both nationally and locally.
Brandon Lewis (Great Yarmouth) (Con)
In light of the time, I shall be very brief. My hon. Friends have well made the point that the tough decisions that our Front-Bench team and the Government are making are based on the deficit that we have inherited, and that that is a problem that we must deal with. I shall not take up time discussing that issue, because it has been well covered.
I wish to discuss my experience as a councillor for more than a decade under the old Labour Government; I was also a council leader. When I listened to the shadow Secretary of State waxing lyrical about what the Labour Government did on local government and what they had planned I did not recognise the fairy tale being told. The local government that I remember as a councillor and council leader is one where my officers wasted countless weeks throughout the year; they were not providing front-line services and were not looking at how we could do more for our residents, but were ticking boxes, filling in forms and keeping different auditors and quangos happy. At the time of the recent announcement of cuts for local government, I was on BBC “Look East” talking about Great Yarmouth and its 2% cut. Labour Members would say that this has happened only in certain areas, but that is not the case because Great Yarmouth’s authority had one of the biggest cuts.
My local authority, which I am proud of, has turned around and said, “We can deal with this. Any good business can deal with a 2% cut, so we can deal with it and we will do so without dealing with front-line services.” I said to the leader of my local council, “If we could wave a magic wand and if central Government could make life easier, faster and better for the council and, more importantly, for the residents of Great Yarmouth, what thing could we do? Is it to provide more money?” He said no.
When I speak to councillors—I found that this was the case when I was a councillor too—I am told that this is not necessarily about the money, but about the ability to deliver services. It is about the ability to have real power and to make decisions locally on matters that matter to people locally. I fully support the Government and I give great credit to my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for the work that the Government are doing so quickly to devolve power to local authorities. I say bring on more, so that we can get residents in areas such as Great Yarmouth to see that their council matters and their vote matters, because their councillors will be making decisions that will affect their lives, not ticking boxes for central Government and suits in Whitehall. I will therefore be fully supporting the amendment, and I say that the more power we can give to local councils to deliver local powers locally with residents, the better.