Budget Resolutions and Economic Situation

Clive Betts Excerpts

Tuesday 9th March 2021 Commons Chamber

[Mr Clive Betts (Sheffield South East) (Lab) [V]]

There are a lot of things missing from this Budget that I could comment on, but I will try to highlight some of the really important ones.

First, local government went into the covid crisis having had the biggest cuts of any part of the public sector since 2010. Some of the costs of covid and some of the loss of income have been covered by the Government, but local government went in with a £5 billion shortfall, and £2.6 billion of those extra costs and lost income have not been covered, so the crisis in funding for local government is all the greater. Croydon has put in a section 114 notice post covid, four other councils have had to have capitalisation plans accepted and we know that many others are on a financial lifeline. In the Budget, there was no mention of extra funding for local government, no mention of financial reform and no mention of reform to the business rates system, which has been promised over and over again.

The Chancellor could not even get the words “social care” out of his mouth when he spoke to the House about the Budget. There was no mention of social care at all, but we know that reform to social care funding is key to the whole reform of local authority funding. Indeed, two Select Committees—the Health and Social Care Committee and the Housing, Communities and Local Government Committee—did a joint report three years ago and gave the Chancellor an oven-ready scheme, to coin a phrase, which would have reformed social care funding with a social care premium. We are still waiting for a response to that report three years later.

There was no mention of the public health grant, despite the incredible work that public health inspectors and directors have done during the covid crisis. If only they had had a fraction of the money that has gone to the private contractors doing track and trace, I think we would all be in a much better position today. And, of course, what is the reward for all those people who have worked so hard in local government services—the social care workers, the public health workers, the environmental health workers and people like the refuse collectors who have kept our important regular services going during this crisis? What is their reward? A pay freeze. That is what their reward is. It is completely unacceptable that these hard-working people should be asked to bear a disproportionate share of trying to get the budget deficit back under control.

If we are going to build back better, then of course we need more social housing. The Select Committee did a report saying that to get to 300,000 homes in this country, 90,000 need to be in the social housing sector, built by councils and housing associations. There was not a penny in the Budget to enable that programme to be got under way, and we estimated that it would cost about £10 billion a year.

What we are seeing, unfortunately, is that for all these important public services and important public servants, the pre-covid austerity has now been translated into—guess what?—post-covid austerity, which is something we should all oppose.