Gordon Marsden
Main Page: Gordon Marsden (Labour - Blackpool South)
Mr Gordon Marsden (Blackpool South) (Lab)
My right hon. Friend rightly talks of what we did in government. Does she share my amazement and that of many hon. Members at the joviality of Government Members? In their first few months in office, the Government ignored the impetus that had been created by the Labour Government with Total Place? The Government had to be dragged, screaming, by their advisers to reconsider, and even then they renamed it.
Caroline Flint
There is a rewriting of history with regard to these good ideas. When I picked up one of the Sunday newspapers to read about changes to planning, I recognised a few changes that had been initiated when I was Minister for Housing and Planning and had been carried on by my right hon. Friend the Member for Wentworth and Dearne (John Healey). Total Place was a very good idea. It was a system by which different organisations came together in common cause to tackle challenges in the community, and to share their funding and budgets. The scheme has had two names since the coalition Government came to power: place-based budgets and community-based budgets. The fact is, it was our idea. I am sure that my hon. Friend the Member for Blackpool South (Mr Marsden) will agree that such innovation is all very well, but that it is difficult to imagine the Total Place concept hitting the ground running in the context of the cuts faced not only in local government but in policing and through the reorganisation of primary care trusts.
Mr Pickles
I want to make some progress first, but I will give way to the right hon. Lady in due course.
It is reasonable for us to have expected to hear in the speech of the right hon. Member for Don Valley how much she would cut from the budget. What percentage reduction does she want from each tier of local government? If she does not like the phasing, which other Department should be cut more next April?
The Opposition have simply lost touch with financial reality. They have got their head in the sand in respect of the urgent need to tackle the nation’s record overdraft and the slide towards a national debt of over £1 trillion. We need to reduce the deficit to keep long-term interest rates down, thereby directly helping families and businesses through the lower cost of loans and mortgages. By reducing spending and restoring the nation’s fiscal credibility, we avoid the massive debt interest bills—over £42 billion a year—which is sucking taxpayers’ money from front-line services.
We had a choice in the most recent spending review: we could face up to the legacy left by Labour—the crippling public debt, the black hole in the nation’s finances—or we could simply let Britain fall into the economic abyss. Looking around Europe, the situation that some of our neighbours continue to face reminds us just how dire the challenges remain.
Mr Pickles
In a moment.
The financial mess that the coalition has inherited is not just because of big banks; it is because of the irresponsible behaviour of big Government.
Mr Pickles
I do indeed. From what I can understand from what the right hon. Member for Don Valley was saying, it seems that she is in favour of cuts but not specific cuts. She is in favour of financial prudence, but not if it involves cuts to local authority spending.
The key argument about the forthcoming grant reductions is that the right hon. Lady seems to think that they will be unfair. How she can assert that when she does not know what the settlement will be is a mystery to us all. Opposition Front Benchers point to briefing figures from the pressure group SIGOMA—special interest group of municipal authorities—without realising that they are being played. SIGOMA understandably wants to paint a dire picture for its members as part of a lobbying exercise ahead of the settlement. It is playing metropolitan areas off against shire counties.
Mr Marsden
The Secretary of State asks why these points are being raised by the Opposition, but he and his colleagues have a record on this issue. The figures and cuts that the Government Front-Bench team produced in June, with the abolition of area-based grants and various other measures, disproportionately hit the parts of the country that we have been talking about.
Mr Pickles
The hon. Gentleman is well aware that in the emergency Budget we had to prevent money that had not been paid out from being paid—it is difficult to take money from areas that have not received any at all. He seems to think that we live in a vacuum. Has he seen what has gone on in other parts of the continent and the problems that other Governments face? Had we not taken these decisions we could have found ourselves in precisely the same position.
Mr Gordon Marsden (Blackpool South) (Lab)
It is a pleasure, albeit a sad one, to speak in this debate about the impact that this Government’s policies have had on my constituency and my local authority. I speak not only for Blackpool, however, but on behalf of many other seaside and coastal towns that have suffered disproportionately under the policies of the Minister’s Department and the Government since they were formed—I will not say since they were elected—in May.
As many Members know, Blackpool and many other seaside towns have always had significant problems that are not just particular to them, but are greatly emphasised. The problems are connected with mobility and transience, and they often have severe pockets of deprivation. It is to the last Government’s credit that significant attempts were made to ameliorate the situation both through spending formulae and through the working neighbourhoods fund, area-based grants, the local enterprise growth initiative, the sea change programme and others. They helped to soften some of the particular problems faced by those areas.
Mr Marsden
Not at this point, but I may do later.
I shall not stray far from the motion before us, but I want to mention, in passing, the significant assistance provided by the Northwest Regional Development Agency, and the same point applies to seaside and coastal towns elsewhere.
Mr Marsden
I would like to make a little progress before giving way. As I was saying, the regional development agencies provided a significant benefit.
What has happened since June this year? First, we had the area-based grants cuts in the emergency Budget. If we look at the figures on the cuts in seaside and coastal towns generally, and particularly at those in Blackpool, we find that in most cases the cuts were twice the level of those made in other areas. It is not necessary to take just my word for it; let me cite the words of Peter Callow, the leader of Conservative-controlled Blackpool council. On Radio Lancashire, commenting on the cuts, he said that
“it is 33 million for a part year remember which equates to £4 million for the whole year, that is a sizeable sum and what I have got to explain to government and what I am doing is saying look behind the glitz and the glamour of Blackpool there is deprivation, we are one of the most deprived areas in the land and we shouldn’t be singled out like this, I understand some of the leafy lanes of Surrey and places have got away with it, well that can’t be right”.
That is what the leader of our Conservative-controlled council said back in June.
Lyn Brown
I am interested in the point my hon. Friend is developing. I understand that Newham council is likely to lose approximately £70 million over three years. Newham, as my hon. Friend will know, has the sixth highest level of deprivation in the country. Richmond, on the other hand—I am sure we all who know who represents that constituency—is to lose only about 9% of its net grant, which amounts to only £4.6 million.
Mr Marsden
I am grateful for that intervention, in which my hon. Friend highlights the disparities that can arise between two boroughs in a relatively small geographical area in London. Those disparities, of course, have been reflected elsewhere. Blackpool had the cuts I mentioned, for example. Then we had the spending review.
I see in his place the Under-Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, the hon. Member for Bromley and Chislehurst (Robert Neill). When he was tackled on these issues during questions immediately following the spending review, he came up with the immortal phrase:
“Those in greatest need ultimately bear the burden of paying off the debt which this country has been left”.—[Official Report, 10 June 2010; Vol. 511, c. 450.]
If there were ever a Freudian slip to demonstrate the position of Conservative Members, who want to punish deprived areas for the problems they face, that was it.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government (Robert Neill)
The hon. Gentleman could at least quote me properly. He should remember that I said that that would be the case if the deficit were not paid down. We are paying down the deficit precisely to protect the most vulnerable—something that his party singularly failed to do.
Mr Marsden
If the Minister consults the Hansard report of the day in question, he will see that he said what I have quoted, that Mr Speaker said “Order”, and that we moved on to other subjects. There was no reference to what he had said.
The spending review speaks of front-loading, and we heard—unusually, coming from a blunt Yorkshireman—some quite waffly references to it by the Secretary of State. We must wait to find out whether all the waffle produces anything, but I can tell the house that the abolition of the area-based grants, and the effective abolition of the working neighbourhoods fund in the second spending review, have had a devastating effect on towns such as Blackpool, not least because—as was pointed out earlier—it is not just a question of what the working neighbourhoods fund did for the public sector, but of what it was also able to do for the private sector in conjunction with that.
We in Blackpool, like those in several other areas, have experienced a double whammy. We have also been left off the list of areas that will receive funds for decent homes, although our borough and community feature on the index of local deprivation as the 12th most deprived in the country.
Labour Members and, to be fair, one or two Government Members have talked of the knock-on effect on other services. In my area the Connexion service, youth services and other services of that nature have already suffered badly, and are likely to continue to suffer badly if anything like the 16% overall cut that is currently being proposed for Blackpool borough council is imposed.
At this year’s Labour party conference, I went to a fringe meeting that had been organised by Action for Children. It was a good, non-party-political meeting, which discussed the involvement of young people in their local communities. It was attended by some very good youth workers from all over the north-west. Virtually all those people, who were doing good work in their communities, had already lost their jobs or were about to do so, either because of the abolition of the future jobs fund or because of cuts resulting from the area-based grant system.
In case Government Members think that this is simply a bit of propaganda from the Opposition, let me remind them what the chief executive of Blackpool council wrote to me in a letter back in July about the reduction in revenue and capital support. He spoke of cuts of £3 million in the area base grant, £1.3 million in education, £731,000 in local enterprise growth initiatives, £116,000 in Supporting People, and £526,000 in the working neighbourhoods fund. The list could go on. In fact, the north-west generally faced the biggest share of the £1.17 billion of local authority cuts that were announced in June. It lost £1 of every £6 that was cut across the United Kingdom.
Gordon Birtwistle (Burnley) (LD)
I was a Burnley councillor for many years. We had the working neighbourhoods fund, but we were well aware that it would end this year. Were Blackpool councillors not aware of that? We made provision for it.
Mr Marsden
I thank the hon. Gentleman for his comments. I understand that he wishes to mitigate some of the criticism that his own councillors have made of the various settlements, but I remind him that the cuts in area-based grant had to be effected in year, in this year, quite apart from what would happen after 2011.
Mr Marsden
My hon. Friend is absolutely right. In common with many other seaside and coastal towns, Blackpool has a lot of small businesses and micro-businesses, and they are precisely the kind of businesses that benefited from the application of the working neighbourhoods fund and who are now suffering as a result of its potential withdrawal.
I want to talk about the situation in Blackpool as it is now. My local authority has told me that, on the basis of a 16% cut, it is looking for cuts of £32 million in its overall budget. Unsurprisingly, that led the leader of Blackpool council to write to the Secretary of State—he has been having quite a sustained correspondence with the Secretary of State, but without a great deal of success. On 6 October he said that he had written in June to highlight the disproportionate impact that the first tranche of funding cuts was having on a needy and deprived local authority and to make a plea that the autumn comprehensive spending review considered a more equitable sharing of any other pain. It did not do that, of course, and he then felt constrained to write again on 5 November saying that his assessment and that of many of his colleagues is that the front loading of formula grant cuts will have an adverse effect of between 12% to 16% next year, which is very significant. He said that there was the anticipation of major job losses in 2011-12 alone and that for a town like Blackpool, where nearly 30% of the working population are currently employed by the public sector and which has seen a 91% increase in JSA over the last two years, such a radical step reduction in central funding would have a catastrophic effect on the local economy. He said that he fully understood the need to reduce the overall deficit over the four-year period but he urged the Government to reconsider their approach prior to the announcement of that provisional settlement in early December.
That is also what all my party colleagues are urging. We are not suggesting that the Secretary of State has a magic wand he can wave to solve all the problems—not that I have ever seen him in Christmas panto. Rather, we are talking about sensible settlements.
We are also talking about the cumulative effect of what this Government have done, because it is not just about the cuts in the working neighbourhoods fund or local government cuts. It is also about what is being done in respect of education maintenance allowances. Some 2,500 young people in Blackpool are now going to be deprived. I went to my sixth-form college last week, where I met the brightest group of first-year sixth formers—all of them girls, incidentally. I have been meeting them for some time. They were all full of enthusiasm for where they were going, and they had all come through the Aimhigher programme. They were also all—bar one, I think—in receipt of EMA, and, of course, they were the last cohort to be receiving that. We are therefore talking about this whole conglomeration of subjects.
The fact is that, even if the Secretary of State believes he has made a significant impact on the current situation, that is not what the journalists are saying. On 25 November, the Local Government Chronicle said that the Secretary of State
“has been rebuffed in a last-ditch plea to the Treasury for funding...Sources close to chief secretary to the Treasury Danny Alexander”—
who was obviously not singing from the same hymn sheet as the Secretary of State today—
“confirmed that the Secretary of State made an unsuccessful plea for more cash earlier this month to mitigate the impact of front-loaded local government cuts.”
The Secretary of State was singing a cheerful song today, but whether he was whistling to keep his spirits up, we will wait to see with the local government settlement.
When we move aside all the statistics, we are talking about the impact of real cuts on real people. I want to conclude by sharing with the House the account of a visit I made to a project in the summer. It is a community garden in a very deprived area in the centre of Blackpool. Everybody had worked hard on it, but the efforts had been co-ordinated by a woman from the council who had worked with the police community support officers and the residents association. The mayor attended, and we all had a wonderful afternoon. At the end the woman from the council came forward and said a few things, and we were then all told to put our hands together and give her a big round of applause because it was her last day. Why was it her last day? It was her last day because she was one of the people losing their job under the area-based grants cut that this Government have brought forward. I do not want—and I am sure many other Members do not want this either—to spend the next 12 months going around my constituency from worthy project to worthy project having similar experiences. Therefore, despite the philosophical and ideological differences between the Government and Opposition Members, I urge the Government to think again. They should look again at the disproportionate effect these policies are having on some of our most deprived communities.
Simon Hughes
I will not give way, as the hon. Gentleman has intervened several times in this debate and I want to press on.
It is not just local government that is important; I want to pay tribute to councillors, of all parties, who serve in local government and to many extremely good officers in local government. It contains some brilliant officers, some less brilliant ones and, as in any walk of life, some people who may not be in their right vocation. Southwark council has some excellent officers, and I pay tribute to them and thank them for their courteous and regularly helpful service.
We know the background to today’s debate: we have to deal with a huge economic legacy of the combination of international problems, the banking crisis and the previous Government’s policies. We know that we have to save public money and we know that local government has to bear its share. I note that the Department for Communities and Local Government has imposed on itself a larger percentage reduction in its funding than it is asking local government to bear.
There will also be good things in the settlement, according to the comprehensive spending review. For example, it is clear that there will be additional money— £1 billion a year—for personal social services, in order to deal with the fact that there are more older people and people are living longer. That is a good thing. There will also be far fewer ring-fenced grants—90 will reduce to 10—and that is a good thing for most local councillors, who want to have that choice. In addition, a set of local community budgets will be trialled around the country. We should be positive about those good things.
The Government have to take two other things into account. The first is that some councils have much more reserve than others. The second is that some councils have the ability to raise much more money through council tax than others, because they serve much richer communities. Those background considerations are absolutely relevant.
Mr Marsden
On that specific point about revenue-raising ability, does the hon. Gentleman agree that this is why, regardless of philosophical arguments about dedicated streams, the severe attack on area-based grants for councils with significant areas of deprivation has been so devastating?
Simon Hughes
That is why a debate has taken place in which some of us have been trying to discuss a formula that is fair. Some bits of funding that are nothing to do with the local government funding settlement will still go to “affluent” and to “less affluent” areas. Such funding cannot be affected by it, which means that those areas will continue to get public money because it is protected in other ways.
I hope—I was going to say this at the end of my speech, but I will say it now—that one of the things that this Government can achieve, given that they are already a Government of two parties, is to work with the Labour party to try to get a more settled, agreed formula for distributing money to local government. Of course the cake size will vary, but the way in which it is divided between county and district council, and between unitary authorities, metropolitan boroughs and London boroughs, is always the subject of terrible struggle every year and has never been entirely satisfactory. This is neither coalition policy, nor Liberal Democrat policy, but I see no reason, given that we have set up an Office for Budget Responsibility to give independent advice, why we could not have an office that does that sort of job for local government and seeks to offer independent advice as to what the formulae should be. That would take that issue out of the inevitable political bartering, which does not, in the end, necessarily produce the right answer. This involves a terribly complex set of issues and I hope that we can find a better way of doing it.
I wish to make a final generic point and then say a couple of specific things relating to today’s agenda. I know that the Government have met and heard from the Local Government Association and London Councils, which are both cross-party bodies. I shall put on the record the LGA’s five considerations, which I share. I have dealt with one, which is the desire for a reduction, if possible, of the impact of front loading. My right hon. Friend the Member for Berwick-upon-Tweed (Sir Alan Beith) has touched on another, which is the desire for an increase in capitalisation limits.
I raised that issue with Ministers the other day. The Government have set aside £200 million to pay for potential redundancy in local government. I understand exactly what the Secretary of State said, which was that we hope that many of the job losses will come through natural wastage and other things, not enforced redundancy. My noble Friend Lord Shipley managed well a reduction in staff when he was a council leader in Newcastle, working with the unions, in a way that mitigated all the worst consequences—that is how it should be done. There are good models for doing that, and they are very much supported by the TUC and its member unions. I have had good and authoritative reports that the real figure is much more like the one that the right hon. Member for Don Valley (Caroline Flint) and I have used and, thus, the total bill may be nearer £2 billion, or thereabouts, than £200 million—that clearly needs to be addressed. It is no good our thinking that local authorities can necessarily find the money that they will need if they are to reduce their staff costs.