Budget Resolutions

David Simmonds Excerpts

Monday 1st November 2021 Commons Chamber

[Steve Reed]

My hon. Friend makes an important point. One of the things that the Government have done over the last 11 years is dramatically increase levels of poverty across the country. They have not been levelling the country up at all, and now they are trying to cover up their track record since they came into Government back in 2010.

To make the situation worse, the Government’s plans to change the local government funding formula—what they call, in an Orwellian way, “the fair funding formula”—will divide communities even further. Analysis by the Local Government Association found that millions of pounds would be redirected away from poorer towns in the north of England to wealthier southern shires, and that 37 of the Conservative MPs newly elected in 2019 would see millions of pounds cut from their towns, including Workington, Sedgefield, Stoke-on-Trent, Redcar, West Bromwich, Bishop Auckland, Grimsby and Leigh. That is not levelling up Britain; it is pulling Britain apart.

Whether it is work, families or communities, this Conservative Government have made our country more unequal. They have ushered in an age of insecurity, where public services have been decimated, wages have fallen in real terms, jobs are more precarious than ever before, our high streets are struggling to survive, and British people are forced to pay the highest housing costs in Europe for some of the worst quality housing. These levels of inequality are not just morally wrong; they make our country weaker. We all pay the price of inequality, with higher levels of crime, family breakdown and mental ill health, and we pay the price a second time by denying people the opportunity to reach their full potential for themselves, their families and their communities. Levelling up must mean opening up opportunity, not closing it down in the way that this Government have done for the last 11 years.

The Secretary of State will find that he cannot fix regional inequalities because the biggest obstacle in his way is his own party’s marriage to an economic model that is based on crony contracts and waste, and that starves whole regions of capital investment. We need new institutions in our regions—such as regional banks to direct investment where it is needed most—if we want the economy to work in the interests of working people in every part of the country.

[David Simmonds (Ruislip, Northwood and Pinner) (Con)]

The hon. Gentleman makes some interesting debating points, but will he share with the House his view why, despite this bad news that he has shared with us, the Conservatives remain overwhelmingly the largest party in local government and made significant gains in the recent local elections, especially in areas that traditionally favoured the Labour party?

[Steve Reed]

Given the Government’s announcement of their intentions to level up the country, the interesting thing will be whether those people feel that they have been levelled up at the next general election and the next set of local elections. That is the only test of what this Government are announcing that will really matter.

The Conservatives have broken the link between work and reward with a decade of stagnant wages and a tax raid on working people; they have undermined families by pushing half a million more children into poverty and refusing to invest properly in kids’ catch-up; they have ripped the fabric out of our communities instead of harnessing the innovation, creativity and compassion that they have to offer; and they have weakened our country with an economic model that has deepened the divides between regions and within communities. That is the polar opposite of levelling up.

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[David Simmonds (Ruislip, Northwood and Pinner) (Con)]

I start by drawing the House’s attention to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests as a serving councillor and vice-president of the Local Government Association. To be a Conservative in politics is about our willingness to take collective responsibility for making difficult and sometimes very tough decisions about money for the benefit that brings our communities and our people in the long term. The difficult decision was made that we would raise taxes to balance the books. My constituents in Ruislip, Northwood and Pinner are now beginning to ask how we are going to demonstrate we are spending that money in the right way—in a way that makes the difference in the policy areas we are concerned about.

In the limited time available, I will focus my attention on two aspects of a Budget that had many very welcome announcements within it: child poverty and the resettlement of refugees into the United Kingdom following commitments made by our Government after the collapse of the civil Government in Afghanistan. At a roundtable organised by the Local Government Association earlier today, which was attended by the hon. Member for Bermondsey and Old Southwark (Neil Coyle), we heard welcome feedback from local government leaders that the finance made available, underpinned by this Budget, will be sufficient to ensure we can fulfil the Government’s commitment to resettle 20,000 people into the United Kingdom, in addition to around 15,000 arriving among those who supported the allied efforts at stabilisation and maintaining the civil Government in Afghanistan. That demonstrates clearly that, while we are still waiting for the guidance about who exactly will benefit—there are logistical challenges ahead—the money is being put in place to ensure that local communities accepting those refugee families will, as was the case with the Syrian scheme, know that they do so without bearing additional cost to council tax payers, because the Government are properly funding the costs.

We have heard a great deal about child poverty in this debate from all parts of the Chamber, including some helpful and clear comments from my hon. Friend the Member for Penistone and Stocksbridge (Miriam Cates). Family hubs, additional investment in youth services and the holiday activities and food programme are all a big step forward in how we approach the issue. Those of us who have been around programmes such as Sure Start for many years will know that, while it was well liked and often well received by people who accessed those programmes, the evidence simply was not there that Sure Start was resolving the issues in communities that it was set up to do. There was the same issue in the United States, where Sure Start originated. It demonstrated the same problem. We need to recognise, for example, that the challenges a child and their family may face do not simply stop at the age of five. We need a new policy solution to these problems, and family hubs in particular are a significant step in the right direction.

In conclusion, there is an old saying that all politics is local. Those in the House who have been or continue to serve as local councillors will be aware of the challenges we face in local government. It was said by the former Prime Minister, David Cameron, that local government was

“the most efficient part of the public sector.”

Every pound spent by a local authority buys the taxpayer more value than any other part of the Government system. By investing appropriately in services that are delivered locally in this Budget, we are demonstrating confidence that our councillors—Conservatives are the largest party in local government—and local authorities with their knowledge of their communities will do the job for us in ensuring that our communities get the help and support they need.