Local Government Funding: Merseyside

Conor McGinn Excerpts

Tuesday 30th October 2018 Westminster Hall

[Maria Eagle (Garston and Halewood) (Lab)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered local government funding in Merseyside.

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Hollobone. I am happy to welcome several of my Merseyside colleagues to the debate.

The Prime Minister says austerity is over. The Chancellor says austerity is coming to an end. Aside from the clear difference between those two statements, neither is the experience of local government leaders and councillors on Merseyside, nor is it set to be their experience over the next few years. My constituency covers two local authority areas, Liverpool City Council and Knowsley Metropolitan Borough Council. I see that my right hon. Friend the Member for Knowsley (Mr Howarth) intends to speak in the debate, so I will focus my remarks on the situation facing Liverpool City Council and he will deal with that facing Knowsley Metropolitan Borough Council. I confine my remarks in that regard to simply saying that the challenge facing Knowsley is equally difficult to Liverpool’s, although it is a smaller authority.

Liverpool City Council has already had to cut £340 million from its budget—some 58% of its total resource—since 2010. This year, it must find a further £41 million of cuts to make up the balance of the £90 million reduction it has been seeking over the city’s three-year budgeting period, which comes to an end next March. By 2020, it will have cut £420 million in total, which was 64% of its budget before austerity was unnecessarily and zealously imposed to such a high degree by the Lib Dem-Tory coalition Government in 2010. Those figures show that there is a lot more cutting to come over the next two years, regardless of what the Chancellor said to us yesterday. Austerity is set to continue for Liverpool City Council, no matter the measures in yesterday’s Budget.

According to the National Audit Office, local authorities in England have seen a 49% reduction in Government funding since 2010, so the cuts imposed on Liverpool have been far higher than average, despite its people having higher levels of deprivation and poverty than the average. Indeed, Liverpool City Council is ranked as the fourth most deprived local authority in the latest indices of multiple deprivation statistics. In fact, 10 of the city’s 30 wards contain a local area within the 1% most deprived nationally, with one—Speke-Garston—in my constituency. Liverpool is ranked as the third most deprived for health and disability and the fifth most for income and employment.

In any fair system, central Government would mandate below-average cuts on Liverpool; that would happen in any system that took any note of the needs of the people of different areas. However, the way the coalition and Tory Governments since 2010 have imposed austerity most emphatically does not take account of the relative needs of the people of different areas who have to deliver the cuts demanded of them. Liverpool has been doubly disadvantaged by facing a larger cut in addition to having more and greater needs to meet.

Take social care as an example. In 2010, Liverpool City Council spent £222 million supporting adults who need help in the community, either because of age, infirmity or disability. That has been reduced to £152 million, despite our ageing population and our population having higher levels of ill health than in many other areas—as set out in the indices of multiple deprivation—meaning more people need the help provided by adult social care services.

[Conor McGinn (St Helens North) (Lab)]

I thank my hon. Friend for securing the debate and for the leadership she gives to Merseyside MPs on these issues. To put this in context, central Government cuts to St Helens Council’s budget are the equivalent of two years of its social care budgets. Similar to Liverpool, we have an ageing population and an expected increase in people suffering from conditions such as dementia. Does she agree that that is completely unsustainable, and that austerity certainly has not ended, for my constituents or hers?

[Maria Eagle]

I agree with my hon. Friend. It is impossible to see how anybody looking at these facts could assert that austerity is either over or is even coming to an end. We obviously do not know what the Government think between those two poles, but it is one or the other, depending on where they are. From where we are, it does not seem that either assertion comes near to explaining the truth.

In Liverpool, £70 million less is being spent on adult social care alone due to the cuts caused by austerity—this political choice that Governments since 2010 have made. Thresholds for eligibility for that help have therefore clearly had to increase, so fewer people get it despite more people needing it. The lack of that support, which should be there and would have been in the past, creates extra burdens on individuals and their families. That is the direct consequence of these cuts in Government funding.