Local Government Finance Bill

Debate between George Howarth and Baroness McIntosh of Pickering

Tuesday 31st January 2012 Commons Chamber

[Mr George Howarth]

rose—

[The Temporary Chair (Miss Anne McIntosh)]

I call Gerald Howarth.

[Mr Howarth]

George—not only a different party, but an entirely different politics, Miss McIntosh.

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Portsmouth South (Mr Hancock). Both he and the hon. Member for Mid Dorset and North Poole (Annette Brooke) made a plea for constructive suggestions. I tried to intervene on the hon. Lady’s contribution with a constructive suggestion, but I think she thought that I was going to be disagreeable, and she refused to accept my intervention.

Many hon. Members have mentioned the consequences of protecting pensioners in the overall scheme, and I will not labour the point. It is important to say at the outset that nobody on the Opposition Benches and, I am sure, elsewhere, disagrees with the principle that pensioners should be protected. It is an important principle, to which we all subscribe. The difficulty that we are trying to address is not the Government’s decree that pensioners should be protected but their failure to deal with the consequences of that in the context of a 10% overall cut.

Some contributions have referred to the impact. For example, the hon. Member for Poole (Mr Syms) wanted more information about how the proposal would work in practice. I would like to rely on a briefing that the special interest group of municipal authorities—SIGOMA—has given me. It is a local government representative group, but of a particular set of local authorities. It concludes that, to protect pensioners’ council tax credit, the rest of council tax payers nationally will face a reduction of 17% rather than 10%. We are talking about averages, and we discussed the problem of averages earlier. The range means that, at the bottom end, the figure will be 13.4%, and at the high end, it will be 25.2%. Those who have concerns should take those figures into account.

I will talk about Knowsley shortly. It is a Knowsley problem—there is a distinct flavour of Knowsley to it—but every hon. Member will be confronted with it if the scheme is implemented in its current form.