Daniel Kawczynski
Main Page: Daniel Kawczynski (Conservative - Shrewsbury and Atcham)Funding for Local Authorities
Daniel Kawczynski Excerpts(11 years, 1 month ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text
Neil Parish
My hon. Friend makes a good point. A council in my constituency, East Devon, shares a chief executive with South Somerset. Even though it is a sort of coalition, because one is Liberal Democrat-controlled and the other is Conservative-controlled, it works at officer level. Even though adjacent councils may be of different political persuasions, they can share resources. If it is possible to share administrative resources and cut expenses, it is possible to deliver a far better up-front service. That is what local government finance is for—to give people services, not to be gobbled up in administration. I have believed that all my political life.
More importantly, the local government settlement for 2014-15 is being frozen until 2020. As a result, the current disparity in funding between urban and rural local authorities will be entrenched, locking in past inequalities. The Government set up the review to settle that disparity, but we now have a damping and a freezing—back to square one for another five years. What is the Minister going to do about it, and how are we going to settle this so that we can transfer funds and have a fair deal?
Daniel Kawczynski (Shrewsbury and Atcham) (Con)
I pay tribute to my hon. Friend for securing this important debate. He and I both represent very rural constituencies. Does he agree that it is important for the Government to explain to us what work they are doing fully to assess and understand the sheer cost of providing services in rural areas in comparison with inner-city areas, and the impact of that on our constituents?
Neil Parish
I know that my hon. Friend represents his rural constituency in Shropshire very well, and he realises that sparsity of population, distances, small schools and so on make services much more expensive to deliver. The irony of his question is that the Government have already done that work. They have already investigated the situation and come up with a policy to transfer those funds. That is what is so frustrating; they will not carry on with the process. That is why I am particularly keen to get them to look at that again and continue the great work that they have already done. That is all I ask. I am not asking for a new wheel; I am just asking for the present wheel to be rolled a bit further.
Neil Parish
Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker. I have probably been over-generous in allowing interventions, but I will now carry on and try to finish my speech—
Neil Parish
Be quiet. [Interruption.] I mean, the hon. Gentleman must be quiet.
To put it in perspective, Devon county council currently spends over £10 million a year on statutory bus pass schemes, which is twice as much as it can afford to invest in the actual public bus services. I am delighted that the Government are sticking to their promise to maintain concessionary bus passes for pensioners, but Devon county council will need to fund them. I am sure that the House will agree that bus passes will do nobody any good if there are no buses on which they can be used.
Public transport is also a challenge for local authorities in rural areas with large road networks to maintain. Devon has the largest road network in England, with nearly 8,000 miles. I believe that it has as many roads as Belgium. In 2010 the council had to repair around 200,000 potholes due to severe weather, and since July 2012 Devon has suffered significant flooding, which has done untold damage to the roads.
I will come now to the final part of my speech. The summer consultation showed rural areas gaining more than £30 million. Those gains will be lost because of the chosen damping mechanism, which will actually increase the funding gap between urban and rural areas, the formula grant for rural authorities having fallen between 1.7% and 2.3% more than that for urban authorities. We are not asking Ministers to reinvent the wheel; we are asking them just to knock the corners off and make it round again. We believe that the Government got it right the first time in the summer of 2012 and that the damping model used has prevented that policy from working. I have met the Minister for Local Government and discussed the matter with him. He has been very fair to us, but I want him now to deliver on fairer funding for rural authorities.
Angela Smith
I accept my hon. Friend’s point. Affordable homes are a key issue in all areas, both rural and urban. It is important that local authorities have the key role in determining, politically, the best way of delivering those new homes—at the city region level in the case of my constituency—across a borough such as Barnsley, which has a lot of green-belt land. In fact, most people will be surprised to hear that the majority of land in Barnsley is green belt.
Daniel Kawczynski
The hon. Lady seems to be implying that it is inherently wrong to voice concerns about differences in funding between rural and metropolitan areas, but I represent a totally rural constituency that receives less than half the funding for education services than certain parts of inner-city areas, so the hon. Lady cannot blame us for trying to raise those concerns.
Angela Smith
I do not blame anybody for raising concerns about their own constituencies, particularly with regard to education, but that is not the key point in relation to funding for local government services. Metropolitan areas have significant rural aspects. In fact, Rotherham, Doncaster and Barnsley between them are 70% rural. The way in which the hon. Gentleman expresses his argument is not helpful in delivering more resources for his area. I repeat that the key issue is the central Government cuts to local government funding. The difference between provincial England and the capital is another issue that has been completely overlooked.
Anne Marie Morris
No survey is perfect, but I do not believe that this one is any less representative than any other. I think that the findings are good.
Daniel Kawczynski
My hon. Friend rightly mentions the important ICM survey. Six out of 10 people think that services are better than they were in 2008. Does that not exemplify the point that, by utilising resources more effectively, services can be provided without increasing council tax massively?
Anne Marie Morris
My hon. Friend is quite right.
The challenge is to ensure that, in rural areas, we get the job done. As has been mentioned, there are problems with the way in which the Government define rural—whether we should use the shire definition, the rural-80 or the rural-50—and with how damping was applied. There are questions to be asked about whether that was done in an appropriate way. As has also been mentioned, there has been some top-slicing of the new homes bonus, so some money that would have gone to local government is going to local enterprise partnerships. Those are all issues that the Government could sensibly look at.
The Government have said that rural areas must do the right thing. They have said that what they proposed for rural areas was fair because there was still fat to be cut. In Devon, council tax has been frozen for the past three years, 3,000 staff have been lost, spending has been cut by £100 million and 98% of council tax is being collected. Fraud accounts for only 0.003% of the budget, which is a very small amount in the grand scheme of things. Our reserves are also relatively modest. There are two separate pots, but the one for ongoing operational costs covers only two days of operating costs and the other covers planned future development.
I understand what the Government are trying to do—we must clearly manage costs—but Devon has done its best to manage its books. It now has to find £130 million of savings. It has looked hard and is now looking for the last £46 million. It is looking at some of the areas that were mentioned by the hon. Member for Penistone and Stocksbridge (Angela Smith): youth services, day care centres, libraries, residential care, children’s centres and community transport. I absolutely agree with her that those things matter.
The challenge is how we address this matter. I say to the Government: let us walk the walk and not just talk the talk. Let us be honest that there was something not quite right in the funding formula and look at it again. Let us also be honest about the top-slicing of the new homes bonus. My concern is that LEPs have not been running for very long. Although I am sure that some of them are more than capable of sensibly using a top-sliced chunk for infrastructure projects, there are others that are very early in their development. Many councils have been planning infrastructure projects for a long time, but now find that the funding is being moved to another body. That should give us pause for thought.
The two areas of dissatisfaction in the ICM survey were potholes and care for older people. Devon has £700 million-worth of work on the roads that has not been done, never mind the problems that are caused by the winter. If we are to reform local government spending, we must look at the Bellwin formula. The way in which it was calculated meant that it gave Devon only half of what it needed to get the roads back in order. As my hon. Friend the Member for Tiverton and Honiton mentioned, that was partly because we have 8,000 miles of road to deal with.
Buses are another key issue. As my hon. Friend the Member for Tiverton and Honiton said, bus passes costs us £10 million and we then have £5 million left to spend on public buses. He said that many people rely on public buses to get to work. Indeed, whether it is to get to work or for any other purpose, more people use the buses than the trains, so it is short-sighted to fail to provide funding for that.
Of course, we cannot forget education and schools. Devon is almost, although not quite, at the bottom of the league table. It is 145th out of the 151 local education authorities. It receives £395 per pupil below the average. Given the additional costs because of transportation and the size of the schools, that is untenable. The Government have recognised that, but we need them to do something.
The Government have promised to put some money from the NHS into local government. However, there is a lack of clarity about how that will happen and how much money it will be. Without that information, it is difficult for local government to sort out its finances.
Finally, although it is absolutely right that communities should work with local authorities to do what they can together, leaving it to the local community to pick up all the work that cannot be afforded is not realistic. A number of community transport groups have come to me because demand well outstrips supply. They are struggling to cope with the number of people who are trying to get to hospital appointments, many of whom have wheelchairs. There are simply not enough drivers or vehicles. We applaud those in the voluntary sector for the fantastic job that they do, but, as the squeeze comes, we need to recognise that they cannot completely fill the gap and that they need help and support in trying to do so.
Mr Betts
There is quite a lot of evidence that there is a real difficulty for local economies. In the past, the larger grants were generally directed at authorities with real difficulties, often in areas where industry had been run down. Those areas often had a higher reliance than others on public sector expenditure, and my hon. Friend is right that the reductions in that expenditure are having a disproportionate impact on those communities. As I said, we are in a serious position. I do not think Ministers recognise where we could be heading—perhaps they hope they might be in another job by the time it happens. We can all wish for better things for ourselves, I suppose.
Let me move the debate forward in a slightly different way. We are where we are, but where will local government go in the future? A bit ironically I suppose, the one good point that might come out of this is that local government is now less reliant on Government grants for funding. Government grants have been cut by nearly half, so a bigger proportion of money comes from taxes that local authorities raise. If we are to look forward to vibrant local government, a less centralised state, and localities being less dependent on central Government for funding, and if we are to be localist and look at the balance of power and the things the Political and Constitutional Reform Committee is doing, we must not simply go back to where we were and recreate the grant systems. We must also consider how we can make local government more financially independent in the future.
There will always be an element of redistribution—we have great inequalities in our country so redistribution will always be necessary—and there will always be a case for some element of Government grant. One problem is that, at present, that element all comes from business rates. Because of that, some sensible ideas the Government have had about localising business rates have become convoluted and complicated because those rates both reward development and try to redistribute from those areas with greater resources to those with the greatest need. In principle, however, that is to be welcomed, although in future we will still need an element of Government grant for redistribution.
Why not take up the LGA’s proposals, give the money to local authorities and allow them to distribute it? That would stop councils simply complaining to the Government that they do not have enough money while others have too much. That happens in Denmark, which has a grown-up system. They sit down and negotiate between local and central Government about the amount of money to be passed over, and local government then makes the redistribution between different local authorities. That has worked for a long time. I would have thought most Ministers welcomed with open arms the idea that they would not be responsible for every allocation to every council in the country. Let us see how radical Ministers can be. The LGA was brave in putting forward that proposal, so let us at least look for radical solutions.
The one tax that local government controls is council tax, which is now virtually frozen because of actions by this Government and the previous one. I want to be critical of them both. We had the nonsense of capping under the previous Government—I spoke against that a number of times in the Chamber—and the nonsense of the referendum under this Government. That is not about democracy but about trying to control local government spending. The idea that central Government should have to call a referendum if they want to change income tax or VAT is clearly nonsense and no Government would ever allow it. Local councils ought to be elected and then free to raise the money. If the electorate do not like it, they will vote for somebody else, and that is what democracy at local level should be about. I am against the referendum proposals and against capping.
Daniel Kawczynski
The Labour party is making great play about the cost of living. In previous years we saw massive increases in council tax, year on year. I remember in Shropshire under a Labour administration that council tax went up by 16% in one year, which had a devastating impact on people with fixed incomes. Surely the hon. Gentleman understands the importance of freezing council tax in these difficult times.
Mr Betts
Of course I understand that and any council would want to try to minimise increases in council tax. However, let us also make clear that cost of living increases can come from a local library closure because people have to buy books instead of borrowing them for free, or from the closure of a leisure centre when a family has to book into a private club that involves a lot of extra cost. Cost of living increases can come in other ways, including through cuts in public services.
I also argue strongly that it is nonsense to have local government’s main tax based on a valuation carried out in 1991, and it is ridiculous that 20 years on we have not had a revaluation. The previous Government, this Government, and the previous Conservative Government all bottled out—it is all too difficult. In the end, we have a completely unrealistic situation. No one understands the system any more, which is an attack on democracy and accountability.
My hon. Friend the Member for Corby (Andy Sawford) in his new role will probably not want to comment on this point, but if we are to reform council tax and make it fairer, the relationship between the value of properties and the amount people pay should be reformed. Those in very expensive, large houses should pay more, but why bother with a mansion tax? All we have to do is increase the higher council tax bands, and ensure that the money that comes in goes to local government and does not get siphoned off by the Treasury for other purposes. That is why I am against the mansion tax—I put that on the record to ensure that I have been critical of what both Governments have done.
Daniel Kawczynski (Shrewsbury and Atcham) (Con)
I remember clearly in 2004 when Carolyn Downs, the then chief executive of Shropshire council, presided over an increase in council tax of 16.6% when the council was controlled by Labour and the Liberal Democrats. Carolyn Downs has gone on to be chief executive of the Local Government Association, but when she was the chief executive of the council her salary was £160,000. I make that point at the outset because I feel strongly that we need to get back to a system in local government in which there is close scrutiny and checks of individuals’ salaries. A salary of £160,000 for chief executives was unacceptable. There was a massive number of managers involved, and I would go so far as to say that there was a certain amount of empire building. We have to get back to ensuring that the money spent goes directly on providing services.
I am extremely pleased that the Secretary of State, the Department and the Minister have encouraged councils to freeze their council tax and to try to reduce the bloated bureaucracy and excess management in local government. Now we are implementing a certain number of cuts, but when we are back to full prosperity, the economy is growing and the country is doing well, I hope we will not go back, having the comfort of economic prosperity, to the bad old days under Labour, when money was poured into local councils without some form of evaluation and critique of how that money is spent and without ensuring that councils are run like efficient businesses, as other sectors of the economy must be.
Mike Thornton (Eastleigh) (LD)
I am surprised that my hon. Friend implies that local councils are over-bureaucratic. I know that I am new to the House, but before that I was a councillor in my borough, where I found that everything was run far more efficiently, far more quickly and far less costly than everything run around here. If the Minister would like to visit Eastleigh borough council to see how to run something efficiently, he would be extremely welcome. Perhaps we should return business rates to the control of local district councils, where the money would be used far more efficiently, effectively and quickly than it would if it was left to bob back and forth to London.
Daniel Kawczynski
I am grateful to my hon. Friend, because he leads me succinctly to my next point, which has already been made. An ICM survey has revealed today that six out of 10 people think services are better now than they were in 2008. That raises the following question: how is it possible that the majority of people in the United Kingdom think that services are better today than they were five years ago, when massive amounts of funding were going to local government? I will outline the situation in Shropshire later in my speech, but we must not forget that important survey finding.
I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Tiverton and Honiton (Neil Parish) on securing the debate and agree with him wholeheartedly. I would like the Minister to take away our message that more needs to be given to rural authorities. The cost of providing services is massively greater in rural areas than it is in cities and inner-city areas. I have made that point repeatedly to the Prime Minister, because it is something I am passionate about.
My No. 1 pledge to my constituents at the last general election was to try to get the funding formula for education provision changed. Shrewsbury receives £4,200 per child each year for their schooling. Other parts of the country get £7,000, £8,000 or £9,000. Of course we understand that children in very deprived inner-city areas might need a little more than we get in Shrewsbury, but not double. It is completely unacceptable in this day and age to have such discrimination against children in one part of the country. They are receiving less than half what children in other parts get. There are schools in my constituency that have nothing like the facilities that schools in inner-city areas have. There are leaking roofs, problems with insulation and all sorts of other problems, which I think is absolutely disgraceful. I will not stop until the funding mechanism is changed and children in Shrewsbury get a fairer deal.
I pay tribute to the leader of Shropshire council, Mr Keith Barrow, who has managed to grapple with the massive cuts imposed by central Government. He has had to cut £87 million from spending, and there are more cuts to come, but he has done so by cutting waste, reducing the number of senior managers and reducing salaries. All that has been done while council tax has been frozen, which is an extraordinary accomplishment. I receive very few letters from constituents complaining about local council services. Actually, as with the national opinion poll, people in Shrewsbury are rather pleased with local services and understand the difficult situation the council is in.
The point I want to make most strongly to the Minister is one that the leader of my council has told me. It is now starting to sell assets in order to reduce the massive debts to the Government that were racked up under Labour. A large percentage of the council’s expenditure goes on servicing those debts. At the moment, if a council wishes to reduce some of its debts to the Government, it will be financially penalised by the Treasury, because it invokes certain clauses on early repayment, just as paying off a mortgage early incurs certain financial penalties. I think that is wrong. The Minister has to look at the issue and negotiate with the Treasury. If a local council is attempting to reduce its historic debt and pay it off slightly earlier by making difficult decisions on sales and streamlining various services, it is very important that the Minister does everything possible to encourage the council by helping it negotiate with the Treasury on those early payments.
I would also like to pay tribute to Helen Ball, the chief executive of Shrewsbury town council, and Peter Nutting, who has run the council extremely well for many years.
Let us not forget rural broadband. I hope the Minister will talk about what additional support is being given to rural broadband, which is so important to so many of our constituents in outlying rural villages.
I reiterate the point that has been made about the importance of helping rural communities with large numbers of senior citizens. Shrewsbury has been voted one of the most attractive towns to live in. It is in the top 10 in England and is one of the most attractive towns for senior citizens to retire to. Let us not forget the additional expenditure required for areas with a large number of senior citizens.
Shropshire council and Telford council stand side by side. I hope the Minister will explain what incentives—what carrots and sticks—he is using to make sure that local neighbouring councils pool resources. The possibility of a shared chief executive has been mentioned. It is vital that the Department does more to encourage those two Shropshire councils to pool their resources and make cost savings and even to merge, if necessary.
Finally, on fire service provision, the Minister has kindly agreed to meet the local Shropshire fire authority. It has complained about the number of cuts it has had to go through and a fire engine is at threat in Shrewsbury. I hope the Minister will look kindly on us when we go to see him about the very important requirement to save that fire engine.
Mr Graham Stuart (Beverley and Holderness) (Con)
It is a great pleasure to take part in this debate. I apologise for my late appearance.
I begin by congratulating my hon. Friend the Member for Tiverton and Honiton (Neil Parish), who secured it and, I know, led it off ably. I am delighted to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Bury St Edmunds (Mr Ruffley), although I should say to him that I have not ceased my duties as a chairman of the rural fair share campaign but have been joined by another co-chair, along with the hon. Member for Workington (Sir Tony Cunningham). It is a full, cross-party campaign recognising the inequity in funding.
My hon. Friend the Member for North Devon (Sir Nick Harvey) put his finger on the core point in his passionate speech. The lowest incomes are found in rural areas, so there is a social justice argument along with the data that we rightly focus on. That social justice argument is hard to rebut, and Ministers in successive Governments have hidden behind an obfuscation of numbers and data. As he said, the simple truth is that people on lower incomes are paying a higher level of tax to get a much thinner—I liked that phrase—level of services.
Daniel Kawczynski
My hon. Friend speaks about his group on rural services being all-party. I hope there are more Labour Members in his caucus than there are in the Chamber today.
Mr Stuart
My aim, along with my co-chairmen, is and always has been to try not to have a Labour-urban versus Tory/Lib Dem-rural battle—although that is difficult to avoid—but rather to say that we will get our arguments right. Perhaps that explains the modesty of our requests—too modest, perhaps—but our aim has always been to ensure that a fair-minded Labour Member of Parliament who does not represent a rural area would see the weight of the argument. Having come into politics, as we all do, to try to make a fairer and better society, people should see that we are not making a special, partial interest, but a case grounded in facts that will lead to a more just outcome.
Mr Robin Walker (Worcester) (Con)
It is a pleasure to follow two such eloquent speeches by my hon. Friends the Members for Beverley and Holderness (Mr Stuart) and for Sleaford and North Hykeham (Stephen Phillips), touched by the very magic dust that they invoked in making their case so strongly. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Tiverton and Honiton (Neil Parish) on securing this debate and thank the Backbench Business Committee for granting it.
The topic of how we fund our local authorities may sometimes seem arcane—a matter for policy wonks or political theorists—but as earlier contributions to the debate have shown, it is in fact intensely practical, with real and direct implications for services in all our constituencies. I am grateful to my hon. Friend the Member for Penrith and The Border (Rory Stewart) for making such a strong case in principle for this small amount of funding that could make a very big difference in rural areas.
In debating this subject, we touch on the very machinery of the country and the whole range of services on which our electorates depend. I do not make the case for endlessly increasing local government funding, as perhaps some Opposition Members have tended to do. My constituents are clear in the belief that local government needs to bear its share of the burden in reducing the deficit and restoring our economic credibility, which was so damaged under the previous Labour Government.
A number of colleagues have mentioned the BBC survey, which shows clearly that it is possible to deliver improved services in difficult circumstances if we work hard at it, something that both Worcester city council and Worcestershire county council have managed to do in the past few years. In recent surveys my association has been conducting across Worcester, the vast majority of my constituents believe that local councils can do more to reduce waste and improve efficiency. Even a substantial majority of those who assign themselves as Labour voters agree with that statement.
What I will make the case for is fairer funding. Each area should get its fair share and should have the best opportunity to deliver services fairly. I am not making the case for each area to pay the same council tax, but it is noticeable that in general, as many colleagues have pointed out, the very rural authorities that are getting funded less are on average paying higher levels of local taxation than urban authorities. Surely it should be a matter for local decision makers to decide what should happen with regard to council tax and to bear in mind the wishes of the people who elect them.
Worcestershire county council has done an admirable job of keeping council tax frozen for a number of years, but it is noticeable that our council tax payers bear a higher share of the burden of the cost of vital public services in our part of the world than they do in urban authorities elsewhere in the west midlands. Worcester city council has made millions of pounds of savings in the past couple of years, but it fears that further cuts will be necessary in the years ahead as a result of not getting a fair share of funding.
I want both our councils to have the best chance of keeping council tax frozen for as long as possible, but to do so we need to ensure that we are getting our fair share of funding from Westminster. I want councils such as Worcestershire to be able to continue to have no library or Sure Start centre closures because they have managed things properly, and to receive fair funding from the Government. As others have already set out, as it currently stands the local government funding formula is not fair and it disadvantages rural areas. The huge gap—on average approximately 50% between rural areas and purely urban areas—is shocking and unjustifiable.
As a member for a city seat it may seem strange that I should be concerned about this, but Worcester, like many county towns, suffers a double penalty by being an urban district in a rural county authority. The vast majority of our funding is granted on the basis of the county unit, with little or no account taken of the many specific urban problems we face. Within Worcester, there are super output areas in the top percentile of deprived wards in the country, yet the overall funding that our local authority receives reflects what might be expected for a green and leafy prosperous county. As other Members have pointed out, rural does not necessarily equate to prosperous.
Worse, and as other colleagues have pointed out, there are additional pressures on all rural authorities, with extra travel costs for almost every part of local government, smaller units covering wider areas and particular challenges for social care. Where these costs are shared among all areas of a county, it is not surprising that the urban core can sometimes miss out. I therefore strongly support a better deal for rural areas and believe it is in the interests of all my urban constituents for the challenges of rural sparsity to be better recognised in the funding system. The local government funding formula is by no means unique in disadvantaging rural areas, as other formulae in education and health do the same. Unfortunately, these effects do not exist in isolation for each individual department, but have a cumulative impact.
In other debates, I have regularly made the case for fundamental reforms to the school funding formula, and I am grateful for the support of both Liberal Democrat and Conservative colleagues. I shall continue to make the case, but as the majority of funding for schools still passes through local authorities, this is not irrelevant to today’s debate. In fact, the growth of academies and the diminution of local authorities’ role in allocating school funding has created additional pressures as lower funded local education authorities struggle to achieve the same economies of scale as they once did.
The so-called education service grant, or the withdrawal of funding from local authorities for the funding of academies, has placed an extra burden on local education authorities in the worse-funded areas, as it has been withdrawn at a national average rate while these areas tend to receive much lower than national average funding. In Worcestershire’s case, this means that we are giving £116 back to the Treasury for every academy pupil, even though the actual funding that it would have spent in maintained schools was £101. Now is not the time for me to fulminate against the outrageous £1,100 per pupil funding gap between pupils in Worcestershire and in neighbouring Birmingham.
Daniel Kawczynski
I pay tribute to my hon. Friend for the extraordinary role he has played in this Parliament in setting out the all-party caucus for campaigning on changing the funding mechanism. This change is the No. 1 pledge I have given to my constituents. For the record, I would like to thank my hon. Friend, and I am sure that other hon. Friends would want to do so, too.
Mr Walker
My hon. Friend is extremely generous. I believe this campaign has strong support across the Back Benches. It is an issue that we can take forward; we must see real progress made on it. I am grateful for my hon. Friend’s comment, but it is, of course, a team effort in which many others have played their part.
In Worcestershire as in many other counties, the education department shares staff and resources with the broader children’s services area, so wherever education funding is under pressure, it places additional pressure on other aspects of children’s services, including looked-after children and safeguarding—issues raised by a number of Opposition Members. As a long-standing supporter of the f40 campaign and having met Ministers many times to discuss it, I know that reform of the school funding formula is on the way and I have every confidence that we will eventually get a fairer deal, but we need to learn the lessons of what seems to have gone wrong with local government funding and not repeat the same mistakes.
It appears that in this case the Government set out to correct some of the imbalance in funding for rural local authorities, but then introduced a damping mechanism that outweighed the impact of the change—effectively, as my hon. Friend the Member for Beverley and Holderness said, putting the whole thing into the deep freeze rather than simply damping it. In effect, a funding reform designed to move things in a fairer direction has been so watered down as to make the problem worse. That cannot be allowed to happen when it comes to school funding, and it should not be allowed to happen to the wider CLG funding for local authorities.