Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government

Debate between Clive Betts and Gareth Snell

1st reading: House of Commons
Tuesday 2nd July 2019 Commons Chamber

[Gareth Snell (Stoke-on-Trent Central) (Lab/Co-op)]

It is an honour to follow the right hon. Member for Witham (Priti Patel). Being married to a councillor, she will appreciate most acutely the tough decisions that councillors must make. Let me begin my speech by thanking councillors of all political parties for their work. Looking around the Chamber this afternoon, I see many Members who I know have served as councillors, in senior leadership roles or as back-benchers. I believe that one of them is still serving as a local authority member today. No councillor stands for election to deal with a five-year budget forecast. They do so for good reason, to help the local communities. We should always remember that, regardless of the decisions that they are forced to make.

That leads me neatly to the main points that I want to make. The hon. Member for Oxford West and Abingdon (Layla Moran) began by talking about the overall global figures that are affecting local government finances. The speeches that we have heard from Members on both sides of the House today have shown that every Member, everywhere, has a series of problems that can be attributed to the way in which the local authority is either run or funded. I agree with the hon. Member for Thirsk and Malton (Kevin Hollinrake) that when this is fixed, a rising tide will lift all those problems. Sadly, however, that rising tide will simply drown some of them, either because they cannot keep pace or because they are already enmeshed in problems that no amount of additional funding will solve.

What we need to think about—and I offer this as a radical suggestion which I hope the Government will consider—is moving away from the idea that we fund councils, fund the police service and fund clinical commissioning groups, and adopt a place-based approach to the way in which money goes into a community. One of the things that we do very well on the Public Accounts Committee is following the taxpayer pound. We have noticed continually that consequential impacts of a decision by a clinical commissioning group will drive up the costs of a service in a local authority. The decision by a police commissioner to close a police station—as is happening in Stoke-on-Trent—pushes up the incidence of antisocial behaviour. It will then be said that it is the council’s responsibility. Littering because of the lack of a recycling service will become detritus, with bricks left on streets. It becomes vandalism.

So many things happen not because of local authority funding, but because of the way in which we fund our entire public service. If the Government and, I hope, our own Front-Benchers—who I can see are listening—would seriously consider that place-based funding, we could eradicate some of the problems without necessarily having to throw lots of money at them. I know that that will not be easy, but if we are serious about a sustainable long-term public sector, we are going to have be honest about it.

The same goes for our social care funding arrangements. The National Audit Office report shows that 80% of social care budgets are overspent. I am pretty sure that if the Ministers at the Dispatch Box were to design a system today for funding adult social care, they would not say, “Let’s take the value of a property from the 1970s and its total value across an entire geographical area determined by a review in the 1970s and say that incremental increases of 2% every year is the best way to fund adult social care.” It is the way that we do it, but it is not the way we would design. If we are genuinely serious about tackling the funding issues in local government, we are going to have to look at the way in which we fund these things long-term and not simply tinker at the edges hoping to massage the figures so that marginal constituencies in one part of the country are better off at the expense of safer constituencies for Opposition parties elsewhere, which is what we talk about in fair funding formulas if we are being brutally honest.

[Mr Betts]

My hon. Friend is making an interesting point about Total Place and how we should approach things, and we had some evidence on that in our recent Select Committee inquiry into local government funding. Does he accept however, that in order to hold that all together we need some local accountability, so we ought to be looking at how we devolve some of those powers to local government, and with it a better system of funding, as my hon. Friend has rightly said?

[Gareth Snell]

I thank my hon. Friend for that and for presciently leading on to my next point, which is about how devolution settlements work and the myriad different settlements that we have, across England predominantly, with city deals, local enterprise partnership arrangements or mayoral combined authorities. That means there are lots of arrangements we can look at to find best practice and then share it. There are examples of mayoral authorities dealing with their housing crisis in clever ways which traditional two-tier local authority areas have neither the capacity in their staff base to do, to be candid, nor perhaps the demand in their local areas for.

If we are to have that accountability structure, there needs to be a greater role for the Department, whatever it might be called. Civil servants from the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government were asked a very simple question at a recent appearance before the Public Accounts Committee: “You say local authority funding is sustainable; what is the matrix by which you make that assessment?” The civil servants were very good at answering some questions, but were unable to give us an exact demonstration of how they make that decision. The NAO disagreed with them on a fact-based, evidence-based assessment, yet when that question was put by numerous members of the Committee, some more vociferously than others, they were unable to give us a clear explanation of how they make those sorts of determinations. If we are going to be serious about the way in which local government is funded, there has to be strong overview and oversight by Departments, but we also need to trust local government.

Local government has been given a series of new responsibilities. I was a councillor and I know that local authorities welcome new responsibilities because it allows them to flex their muscles and do things in an imaginative and innovative way. However, they are restricted in how they are able to deliver them—they find themselves straitjacketed—and they suddenly find themselves carrying unnecessary burdens in order to deliver something that they know they could do better if they were allowed to. They do not make a hash of it but they end up not reaching their full potential.

Modern Slavery and Victim Support

Debate between Clive Betts and Gareth Snell

Wednesday 27th March 2019 Westminster Hall

[Gareth Snell (Stoke-on-Trent Central) (Lab/Co-op)]

I congratulate the right hon. Member for Chingford and Woodford Green (Mr Duncan Smith)—I nearly said “north London”, to be quite honest—on securing this debate. I also thank the Minister, as I know she takes this issue very seriously.

I will echo some of the points made by my hon. Friend the Member for Gedling (Vernon Coaker) about the non-party political nature of this debate. I have been to a number of debates on this issue in this House where, regardless of political party, of where a Member comes from in the country and of our personal politics, there is a clear understanding that this is a problem that we can tackle. Collectively, we have the ability to tackle it and Lord McColl’s Bill gives us the vehicle to tackle it. If we can make progress with that, we will take a huge step forward in securing equality and justice for those people who have suffered at the hands of some of the most unscrupulous people in our country.

I also agree with my hon. Friend the Member for Nottingham North (Alex Norris) about the work being done by the right hon. Members for Birkenhead (Frank Field) and for Basingstoke (Mrs Miller). The Modern Slavery Act 2015 was a starting point; it was never an end point. It was never meant to be the be-all and end-all of the process. It was introduced to say, “We have a problem. Here is how we can start to fix it, but this has to evolve over time to reflect the nature of the problem that we have in this country.”

I fear that modern slavery on a small scale—the individual cases—does not necessarily get the traction that it deserves. I will just tell a little story, if I may, about a constituent of mine, who contacted me regarding concerns that he had about social care. He is an elderly gentleman who lives in a very nice part of my constituency. He did not want to sell his house to go into residential care, so he told me that he had read about a scheme, one that he thought was very sensible and very logical, whereby he could have somebody come from abroad who could live in his house, who he would feed and give a bit of pocket money to, and in return they would help him with his domestic care arrangements. In his mind, that was a perfectly acceptable, almost magnanimous, thing that he could do to help somebody from overseas who he knew was less fortunate than him. I talked him through it, explaining that that was actually modern slavery—that was somebody who would be in tied employment to him. He did not see it like that. He does now, I hasten to add, but at the time he saw it as a way both to help somebody and to get some of the help that he needs.

As we talk about the process going forward, we need to be very clear that, as my hon. Friend the Member for Nottingham North said, the big companies will be covered by the 2015 Act and by the declarations, but these smaller situations, where individuals do not realise that they are perpetrating a crime and the victims do not realise that they are being subjected to a crime, need to be teased out.

The hon. Member for South West Bedfordshire (Andrew Selous) talked about asylum seekers versus those who are victims of modern slavery. I think the reason for that is that somebody can self-refer to the asylum programme but they cannot self-refer to the modern slavery referral mechanism. Could the Minister say whether that is something that the Government will look at?

I will not take up any more time, Mr Betts, but all I will say finally is that we know, because we have debated this in this Chamber and in the main Chamber on numerous occasions, that there is a growing problem, a growing need for change and a growing opportunity for change. Organisations such as the Co-operative party, whose charter has been signed by many cross-party councils, show that there are practical solutions to offer help. The Co-operative Group, through its Bright Future programme, offers jobs to people who have been found to be victims of modern slavery. However, these are all ad hoc things that are being done in spite of Government rather than with Government.

All I hope is that, at the end of this debate, the Minister can take back to the Government and the Leader of the House the message that some time to debate Lord McColl’s Bill is all we are asking for, so that we can make progress and help those people who need our help most.

[Mr Clive Betts (in the Chair)]

I thank all Members for their co-operation; that is very good indeed. We move on now to the Front Benchers, who will have 10 minutes each, so that there are a few minutes for the Member who secured the debate to wind up at the end.

European Union (Withdrawal) Act

Debate between Clive Betts and Gareth Snell

Thursday 6th December 2018 Commons Chamber

[Mr Betts]

rose—

[Gareth Snell]

rose—

Education and Local Services

Debate between Clive Betts and Gareth Snell

Tuesday 27th June 2017 Commons Chamber

[Mr Betts]

Will the Minister give way?

[Gareth Snell]

Will the Minister give way?

[Mr Jones]

I will make some more progress before I give way.

We are also responding positively to help councils meet the cost of increasing service pressures. In the spring Budget we provided an additional £2 billion to put social care on a more stable footing, and allowed relevant authorities the flexibility to raise more income through the adult social care precept. My right hon. Friend the Member for Forest of Dean (Mr Harper) and my hon. Friend the Member for Stafford (Jeremy Lefroy) raised the important issue of social care. The former mentioned the importance of social care for the working-age population and what more we can do to get people with learning disabilities, for example, into work. That is an extremely important aspiration for the Government. The latter talked about what more we can do to deal with the social care challenges that we face, on which the Government will bring forward plans during this Parliament.