Localism Bill
Debate between Caroline Flint and Christopher Pincher(13 years, 10 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text
Caroline Flint
I will give way in a little while, but I want to make some progress.
Perhaps we should not be surprised that the Secretary of State has been captured by Whitehall. In the eight months since his appointment, the Cabinet’s champion for local communities has bothered to make only six visits. Perhaps that is why he is so dangerously out of touch. To be fair, although he does not visit much, he tries to keep in touch by writing. Week after week, local councils are inundated by missives, diatribes and diktats from Ministers, lecturing them on how to organise a street party for the diamond jubilee and on the right way to celebrate Christmas, instructing them on what their street signs should look like and when to empty the bins, and telling them to axe their council newspapers even if it costs more to put the notices in the local paper. That is not localism, and nor is much of the Bill. It is no good providing a general power of competence in one clause if the next four clauses give the Secretary of State the power to curtail it.
We believe that elected mayors can offer effective local leadership. That is why we introduced the model, giving local councils and local people the power to elect a mayor if they wanted one. However, the only person whom the Bill gives a vote to is the Secretary of State.
Caroline Flint
I will give way shortly, but I want to finish this point, because the Secretary of State has made much of his devolution of powers in relation to mayors. The only person whom the Bill gives a vote to in relation to mayors is the Secretary of State. How democratic is it for the Secretary of State to appoint a shadow mayor ahead of a referendum for local people? Would not such a person have an advantage when standing for mayor? It cannot be right or democratic for the leader of whatever party it might be to have such an advantage in a mayoral election.
The Bill could have encouraged and empowered more people to get involved in the way their community is run and made local councils more responsive to the communities they serve. Instead, it abolishes the duty on councils to provide information to people about how their local council works and how they can get involved. It also states that councils no longer have to bother replying to petitions from local people. I do not understand that.
Christopher Pincher
I am obliged to the right hon. Lady for giving way; we are obviously getting on better now. She talks about democracy. Can she explain how democratic it was, over 13 years of a Labour Government, to increase the amount of ring-fencing from 4% to 15% of local government spend? Was not that simply a case of Labour saying that Brown knew best?
Caroline Flint
In some cases, there was an argument for some ring-fencing, and I am not going to step away from that. I am glad to say, however, that as we moved through from ring-fencing to local area agreements, we encouraged local councils and their partners in the police, health and elsewhere to come forward with plans of their own. That is what was happening. I think I am right in saying that the present Administration agree with the work on Total Place. They were going to give it another name, but they still agreed with the principle of partners coming together in that way. However, there is nothing in the Bill to help Total Place, or whatever it was going to be called under the coalition Government, and that is a crying shame.
Local Government Funding
Debate between Caroline Flint and Christopher Pincher(13 years, 11 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text
Caroline Flint
The hon. Gentleman is indeed a neighbour of mine in Yorkshire. Correct me if I am wrong, but I cannot remember that there were many Tory-controlled councils that did not want free swimming when it was being offered or that did not want a number of other benefits for their communities. However, I would have to say to the hon. Gentleman, in the nicest possible way, that if people thought it was not rosy then, they must now be in despair about what is ahead.
We are hearing from councillors of all parties that if councils are not given enough time to plan which cuts to make, they will be forced into making rushed decisions with no time to plan for the consequences, which could end up costing more than they save.
Caroline Flint
I have been very generous in taking interventions, and I am conscious of the number of Members who wish to speak in the debate. [Interruption.] I do not think that hon. Members can accuse me of not being generous in giving way. I will take more interventions later, but I should like to make a bit of progress.
Caroline Flint
The hon. Gentleman heard what I had to say—I am going to make a bit of progress, but I may take more interventions later.
People will pay the price with their jobs. The Secretary of State likes to give the impression that savings can be made without causing job losses, as though simply by freezing recruitment, natural wastage, redeploying people and scrapping or sharing back-room functions, local councils will find the savings they need to make without hitting front-line services. Local councils cannot deliver such savings so quickly on top of the £1 billion of savings they have already made this year without cutting jobs or reducing services. Paul Carter, the Tory Kent council leader, said:
“There is only one way of bringing budgets into line. One is to employ less people and the other is to do fewer things.”
In fact that is two, but I take his point. Up and down the country, local authorities are already cutting vital front-line services and shedding staff.
Caroline Flint
No, I will not give way.
Councils are cutting not just staff in back-room functions but teaching assistants, social workers and street cleaners—hundreds of thousands of people delivering essential front-line services. There will be 140,000 of them this year alone, according to the Local Government Association, which has upped its prediction from 100,000. In Birmingham, 26,000 staff have been warned that they could lose their jobs, and in Bradford the figure is 10,000. They, along with the people who depend on the services they provide, will pay the price for the coalition Government’s choices.
It is no good the Government trying to use last week’s Office for Budget Responsibility forecast to obscure the heavy job losses that will be inflicted on local government. The OBR forecast shows that Whitehall Departments will lose fewer staff than had been feared, because the cuts were slightly less than had been predicted in the Budget. However, the cuts to local government are deeper and faster than had been expected, and, as a result, the LGA says that more workers, not fewer, will lose their jobs this year—40,000 more of them, all because the Government chose to impose such heavy front-loaded cuts on local councils.
Caroline Flint
No, I will not.
It is unclear how local councils will meet the costs of laying off so many staff. The LGA believes that redundancy costs alone could be as high as £2 billion, but the Government’s capitalisation arrangements, which were set up to help councils with the cost of cutting jobs, come to only £200 million. That could be as little as one tenth of what is needed. If councils are not given more support and more flexibility to cover the costs of redundancy payments, it will simply mean more cuts elsewhere and ever deeper cuts to vital front-line services.
Local councils cannot deliver the savings they need simply by trimming a few salaries at the top, scrapping council newspapers or encouraging councils to dip into their reserves. Local councils have a duty to find the best deal for council tax payers, which includes ensuring that councils’ executives are not paid over the odds. Labour introduced more transparency in chief executive pay, and restraint is vital, particularly in the current economic climate. It is absolutely fanciful, however, to suggest that reducing a handful of executive salaries across the country will solve the problem of huge front-loaded cuts, and the Secretary of State knows it.
Caroline Flint
I have already given way to the hon. Gentleman, and I will not do so again.
How is it fair that the communities most reliant on public sector employment will lose the greatest number of jobs? How is it fair that the areas most in need will find their services most cut? How is it fair that the communities least able to shoulder the brunt of cuts to local councils will bear the heaviest burden? Yet that is exactly what will happen, as the Under-Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, the hon. Member for Bromley and Chislehurst (Robert Neill) let slip earlier in the year, when he said:
“Those in greatest need ultimately bear the burden of paying off the debt”.—[Official Report, 10 June 2010; Vol. 511, c. 450.]
The same is true of the Government’s plans for a council tax freeze. It might sound fair, but it is not, because it gives the most to the wealthier councils with the biggest council tax yield—the councils with the broadest base of middle and high band properties—and the least to poorer councils with more modest properties. This involves money that has been top-sliced from local councils’ funding, resulting in a double whammy for our poorest areas.
It is not just people who work in local government who will lose out. Hundreds of thousands of people across the country who work in the private sector—plumbers, builders, electricians, IT companies and office suppliers—depend on local council contracts. Local councils spend nearly £35 billion every year procuring services and supplies from the private sector, with more than £20 billion going to small and medium-sized businesses. Some of those firms rely on public sector contracts for 50% or 60% of their business, and if local council contracts dry up, some of them will have to lose staff and might even go out of business altogether. PricewaterhouseCoopers forecasts that for every job lost in the public sector, another will be lost in the private sector, so cuts in local government funding will hit not just those who work in local government and those who rely on its services, but the wider local economy.
What of the Government’s suggestion that if local councils do less, voluntary groups will miraculously emerge and seamlessly fill the gap left by local authorities? The week before last, the Secretary of State warned the House that local councils would “rue the day” they cut funding to voluntary organisations, but what choice will they have? When nearly a third of voluntary organisations rely on funding from local authorities, and local authorities are losing nearly a third of their funding—much of it this year—voluntary groups will lose out. Local councils and voluntary groups are not adversaries—they work together and rely on each other. Voluntary groups reach parts of the community and fulfil certain roles that local councils sometimes cannot, and local councils have the resources and support at their disposal that voluntary groups do not always have. Without each other, they are both weakened.
Christopher Pincher
I am indebted to the right hon. Lady for giving way. It is nice to hear her support for the big society and voluntary groups, but she seems to have rather a selective memory. May I remind her of the BBC report published on 1 March this year, when her party was still in government? It stated that very significant cuts in local government would have to be made, whichever party was in power, to deal with the depth and scale of the recession that her Government had created. The right hon. Member for Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath (Mr Brown) also said that there would have to be economies. With friends like those, does she need enemies?