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.