Dennis Skinner
Main Page: Dennis Skinner (Labour - Bolsover)(8 years, 4 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text
Greg Clark
In the case of Solihull, there will be £12 million available from the social care package for it to use. The great advantage of a four-year settlement is that reserves can be used to smooth the transition over the spending review period with the certainty and confidence that comes from knowing what the budgets are going to be for each of those years.
Mr Dennis Skinner (Bolsover) (Lab)
In the hour since the Secretary of State got to his feet, he has not once acknowledged that this statement today is set against a background of Derbyshire, for example, having a 40% cut in its grant a few years ago. It has still not recovered from that £157 million cut. That is what he does not recognise. And I will tell him something else, in a question. Does he understand that this is like a Budget statement made by his pal Osborne, of the northern poorhouse variety? It is going to unravel as it goes along. The Minister had better glory in these few moments because by tomorrow, and certainly by next week when the detail is out, people will realise that it is nothing but another Tory con.
Greg Clark
The hon. Gentleman is characteristically churlish. If he had listened to my statement, he would have heard me pay tribute to the savings that councils have made, and of course they had to make them because we had the biggest deficit in peacetime history bequeathed to us by the party of which he is a member. What we are doing in this settlement is providing extra resources to meet the pressures on social services that have been identified. In the case of Derbyshire, that includes an increase of nearly £50 million in funding for adult social care from the package announced in the spending review.