Prepayment Meters: Ofgem Decision

Debate between Graham Stuart and Robert Neill

Monday 6th February 2023 Commons Chamber

[Graham Stuart]

I entirely agree with the hon. Lady. That is exactly the sort of development we want to emerge from what has happened. We want to ensure that prepayment meters are removed when they should not have been installed, that people’s rights are respected, and that if the processes that should have been followed have not been followed, compensation is provided as well.

[Sir Robert Neill (Bromley and Chislehurst) (Con)]

It is clear from the evidence received by the Justice Committee only last week and, now, from the statement made by the senior presiding judge, Lord Justice Edis, that—leaving aside the merits or otherwise of prepayment meters—the agreement by the judiciary to deal with warrants in bulk resulted from their reliance on assurances given by the energy providers that they had complied with Ofgem’s requirements and that the representatives of the energy providers, giving evidence in relation to each bulk application, would swear on oath that the requirements had been met. It is clear that in many cases they cannot have been met. That must surely indicate, first, that the process itself is flawed and should not be continued and, secondly, that there must be an inquiry into not just the process itself, but the suitability of some of those who are representing the energy suppliers and Ofgem in court. Either they gave misleading information by inadvertence or, potentially, they did so deliberately, which, on oath, amounts to perjury. That is a very serious matter which brings the court process into disrepute, and it needs to be investigated too.

[Graham Stuart]

I thank my learned hon. Friend for his typically erudite question, and I agree with him. That is why, two weeks ago, we said that we would work with the Ministry of Justice to look into this and ensure that the processes were suitably robust. It is clear—not only, potentially, from court proceedings but from evidence given to the regulator—that some suppliers did not provide evidence on which we could rely.

Education Funding in London

Debate between Graham Stuart and Robert Neill

Wednesday 4th May 2016 Commons Chamber

[Robert Neill]

The hon. Lady is almost an hon. Friend when West Ham are playing on Saturdays, and we hope for a good end to the season. She is right, and that brings me to the second point about funding. First, some outer-London boroughs are no better funded than shire counties anyway, yet in London there are much greater costs than in the rest of the country; and secondly, there is an artificial distinction in how funding in London is split up between inner and outer London. If justice is to be done in a formula, we need to move away from that distinction, which is purely historical. It goes back to the creation of the Greater London Council in 1963, when the then Inner London Education Authority was in fact part of the old London County Council, which had been a county education authority, while the outer-London boroughs had been educational authorities in their own right, either as parts of counties or as county boroughs. The historical anomaly that the hon. Lady mentions is the fact that her local authority is an amalgamation of two county boroughs that are part of the east end but were not in a county of London, so are treated as being in outer London, whereas Wandsworth, for example, which, in many respects, is much more prosperous, is an inner-London borough. That is a wholly illogical and unsustainable distinction that we need to break down because it distorts the arrangements.

[Graham Stuart (Beverley and Holderness) (Con)]

My hon. Friend is right. The funding system we have today, handed over from the previous Labour Government, is broken in London and in urban and rural areas alike, and needs to be fixed. On additional costs in London, no proposal that I have seen from anyone, including F40, suggests anything other than that London would continue to have significantly more money per head than other areas.

[Robert Neill]

I am grateful for that point, and I accept it. Provided that we get that built in, this need not be an argument, but rather a question of making sure that any formula reflects the diversity of needs that exists within London.

Local Government Finance (England)

Debate between Graham Stuart and Robert Neill

Wednesday 10th February 2016 Commons Chamber

[Robert Neill]

Yes, of course. That is precisely why the Government set up the local enterprise partnerships, and why under the previous regime we set up the arrangements for top-ups and tariffs, which I hope we can simplify in future.

The simplistic idea that we cannot be, to some degree, masters of our own destiny is wrong. In particular, what seems to me utterly wrong is that a local authority such as Bromley, which has historically had the lowest unit costs per head in London, was treated on a formulaic basis in exactly the same way as local authorities that had never bothered to keep their unit costs down and which were never, therefore, driven by efficiency in the same way as we were. Once, when I commented that there was no reward for efficiency in the formula, I was told by a civil servant, “Well, Minister, surely efficiency is its own reward.” He did not grasp the concept. I am glad to say now that Ministers and officials in the Department for Communities and Local Government do grasp the concept, which should be fundamental to the way we go forward.

I welcome what has been done for Bromley, but more importantly, I ask the Secretary of State to ensure that we take forward those basic principles to the next degree so that when we get to the calculation of the needs element, I hope we will remember that there are more than simply the old-fashioned demographic trends in what constitutes needs. As has been observed, the way that needs were calculated in the past, for example, took a simplistic weighting of density as equating with deprivation. That was not the case at all. The way that both inner London and outer London have changed demonstrates that clearly.

[Graham Stuart]

Will my hon. Friend give way?

[Robert Neill]

I had better not because I need to save time.

Very often, the greatest driver of adult social care is not purely deprivation; it is age profile, as much as anything else. We need to build that sort of thing into the equation. We also need to make sure that where local authorities—

Local Government Finance

Debate between Graham Stuart and Robert Neill

Tuesday 10th February 2015 Commons Chamber

[Robert Neill]

That is certainly true of Labour Governments when they have come into office. I would gently add that when this coalition Government came into office we said that we would abolish capping and get rid of the Standards Board and the comprehensive area assessments, and we did so. We actually delivered on what we said. That is the difference between the two.

[Mr Graham Stuart]

My hon. Friend is rightly dissecting the speech given by the shadow Secretary of State, who failed to say, despite having repeated opportunities to do so, that he would seek to redress the imbalance between rural and urban areas. Is it not clear that every rural community in this country should recognise that a Labour Government will put its own political interests ahead of a fair and equitable settlement? They should not be fooled by the words that have come from the shadow Secretary of State’s mouth today, because he refused to commit to a change that would make the situation fairer.

[Robert Neill]

At the end of the day, it is implicit that a Labour Government would carry out a redistribution. We know from experience that the clever—and sometimes surreptitious—tweaking of the weightings in those 270-odd elements that go into the formula grants through the regression analysis was deliberately manufactured to move money away from parts of this country to those that historically tended to vote Labour. There is no getting away from that reality and the same thing will be done again.

My hon. and learned Friend the Member for North East Hertfordshire (Sir Oliver Heald) made a serious point about what would happen to those authorities dealing with housing need, which I thought both parties recognised. The current Government have said, sensibly, that the money should follow the population growth, because that results in the costs of services being given to local authorities. The Labour party wants to scrap that entirely. It is abject nonsense to go down that route.