Grant Shapps
Main Page: Grant Shapps (Conservative - Welwyn Hatfield)
The Minister for Housing (Grant Shapps)
I beg to move an amendment, to leave out from “House” to the end of the Question and add:
“regrets the doubling of council tax under the last government, its cuts to services such as rubbish collections and its legacy of public debt; expresses concern that the prospect of paying for £70 billion a year in debt interest represents a total of more than is currently raised from council tax, business rates, stamp duty and inheritance tax combined; welcomes the new Government’s immediate support for frontline services by protecting £29 billion of formula grant, removing £1.2 billion of ring-fencing and abolishing red tape such as the Comprehensive Area Assessment; backs the support for hard-working families and pensioners through a council tax freeze and the abolition of the previous government’s plans for new bin taxes; further welcomes the scrapping of the unfair ports tax which threatened to harm Britain’s whole manufacturing sector; supports the reductions in business rates for small firms; acknowledges the significant efficiency savings already delivered by local government but believes that there is further scope for savings through joint working, professional procurement practices and radical town hall transparency; and asserts the importance of delivering local economic growth to all local communities across the country, assisted by new financial incentives, and of giving new freedoms to councils to allow them to focus their help on local priorities and those most in need.”.
I was a bit surprised to hear the right hon. Member for Southampton, Itchen (Mr Denham) attack the Secretary of State, who had taken the trouble to write him a personal note—it was delivered by hand to his office at 11.30 this morning—explaining that he was attending a regional Cabinet meeting in Yorkshire to talk about the announcement that was first made in the Budget statement last week of a £1 billion fund to help the very areas of the country that the right hon. Gentleman has just complained will lose funding.
Stephen Hammond (Wimbledon) (Con)
I saw the right hon. Member for Southampton, Itchen (Mr Denham) shake his head. The personal letter was put on the letterboard by me this morning, and my office telephoned his office twice to ensure that it was there.
Grant Shapps
I am grateful to my hon. Friend for clarifying that. I now understand that the note was in the right hon. Gentleman’s pigeonhole, and that the telephone call—[Interruption.]
Clive Efford
On a point of order, Mr. Speaker. I am not sure whether I heard it right, but I believe that we have just heard an announcement of a £1 billion fund. I wonder why that was not announced in a statement to the House.
Mr Speaker
Before I respond to the point of order, I shall be happy to hear a statement or clarification from the Minister, from whose lips I think the words came.
Grant Shapps
The fund was announced in the Budget, Mr Speaker. If the hon. Member for Eltham (Clive Efford) was present last week, he will have heard the Chancellor of the Exchequer announce it at this Dispatch Box. Let me clarify another point. My hon. Friend the Member for Wimbledon (Stephen Hammond) also mentioned that he had telephoned the office of the right hon. Member for Southampton, Itchen to check that the letter had been received. I am very surprised by the rather discourteous and disingenuous comments about my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State.
Mr Blunkett
Is this the £1 billion that the Government have just announced that they are withdrawing as a result of the abolition of the regional development agencies, which they promised before and after the election that they would abolish only if there was no support at local level?
Grant Shapps
I will come in a moment to the RDAs that were set up by Lord Prescott. In the meantime, I can tell the right hon. Gentleman that this is a new £1 billion—the regional development fund £1 billion announced in last week’s Budget and designed to help— [Interruption.] Labour Members do not want to hear about this, but it is designed to help in exactly the kind of constituencies that they have come here today to complain are being underfunded. They do not want to know that this coalition Government are doing something to help those areas. That is the truth.
We live in grave financial times, and the previous Government bequeathed a scorched-earth policy. As Labour’s departing Chief Secretary declared, “I’m afraid there’s no money left. Good luck.” [Interruption.] They do not want to hear that either, but it was what the note said, and it also happened to be true.
We inherited spending commitments funded by a litany of IOUs scrawled on the back of fag packets and a toxic legacy of debt from an Administration who went on a spending spree with the nation’s credit card. Our most immediate priority is therefore to reduce the nation’s chronic public spending deficit to pave the way for economic recovery.
Alison McGovern (Wirral South) (Lab)
The hon. Gentleman describes again this picture of deals scrawled on the back of fag packets. Would he like to make a comment to my constituents in Wirral who work for companies that spent a great deal of time working hand in glove with the RDA and the Government to protect our local economy and have been thrown into disarray by the policy being made on the hoof by the new Government? I will listen to anything the Minister has to say that will help us protect our local economy, and I will be grateful for his comments.
Grant Shapps
I welcome the hon. Lady’s intervention. She was not here in the last Parliament, but had she been she might have read our green paper, which describes in detail our plans for the RDAs. Labour Members seem to think that when there is a change of Government, policies should just roll on even if they have not worked. The RDAs were a case in point, of policies that cost a lot of money and got us nowhere.
The prospect of paying £70 billion in debt interest is of deep concern, but apparently not on the Opposition Benches, where it is as if the money has not run out, the party is not over and we can just carry on spending imaginary funds. That £70 billion in debt repayments is more money than the council tax, business rates, stamp duty and the inheritance tax collect put together. That is the size of the deficit we are up against. So we need to tighten our belts. Ministers are cutting their pay, and it is also fair to ask local authorities to pay their part towards the £6.2 billion public sector savings required this year.
Hazel Blears
Does the right hon. Gentleman believe that it will help the nation’s finances to cut the future jobs fund and the working neighbourhoods fund and to throw more young people on the dole so that they will not be paying tax and national insurance? Does he really think that that adds up to a credible economic policy?
Grant Shapps
Well, I heard with interest what the right hon. Member for Southampton, Itchen had to say about some of the funds. The truth is that existing commitments are being honoured and a new fund is going to be set up to pull together the many different streams that currently help people get back to work. It seems to me that again Labour Members see any change that did not emanate from Labour during the 13 years in which it was in Government as a problem and are willing to attack it.
Grant Shapps
I shall give way in a moment after making a little progress.
So the £6.2 billion immediate savings this year are the priority to tackle the inherited £156 billion deficit. It is worth saying it again—£156 billion. [Interruption.] They do not want to hear it, because the figures were in danger of bankrupting this country—of putting us into a Greek-style crash. But to hear the right hon. Member for Southampton, Itchen today from the Dispatch Box, one would not believe that he was speaking for the same party that sat on the Government Benches and took this country to the edge of that fiscal position.
Now with this fiscal challenge we also have an opportunity. Our actions to rebalance the public finances give us a chance to decentralise power, to weaken the command-and-control apparatus of the central state. Devolution is the solution; the centralised state the problem. We need to cut wasteful spending, but let us put local councillors and local people back in the driving seat.
Claire Perry (Devizes) (Con)
On that very point, we hear a lot about how we could have saved money from efficiency savings, and that is a laudable thing to talk about, but the Lyons report in 2007 said that targets and inspections inhibited councils’ ability to serve their locality. We know that targets and inspections cost more than £2.5 million a year, so if Opposition Members were so anxious to find efficiencies why did they not start by stopping that ridiculous top-down inspection regime?
Grant Shapps
I am very grateful to my hon. Friend for mentioning some of the top-down inspection regimes, such as the comprehensive area assessment, a £39 million programme responsible for—get this—wasting 151,000 days of local government officers’ time each year, and for what purpose, what advantage, what great body of knowledge that could somehow be used? The answer is that the previous Government did not know when the money had run out and carried on spending it ad infinitum.
Chris Leslie
Will the right hon. Gentleman scrap the Audit Commission? Will there be no audit or inspection?
Grant Shapps
We certainly will have inspections and a basic template. The question is: how much inspection do we need? I invite any Opposition Member to explain how spending 151,000 days of officer time answering a comprehensive area assessment was of any use to local residents. Opposition Members talk about localism, but they do not get it. They talk about the principles of handing over power, but they do not understand that when—according to 2006 research—officers in town halls spend 80% of their time servicing the needs of Ministers and Whitehall and only 20% of their time looking after local residents, they no longer serve the democratic values of local people. That is not localism; what we are describing today is localism.
In these tough times it will be our goal to protect those in the greatest need—local residents and, especially, struggling families and pensioners. Under Labour, council tax more than doubled. We will work with local councils to freeze council tax for a year and, if we can afford it, for another one. Scotland has done it, with band D council tax now £290 a year less than the comparative figure south of the border. We want that to happen in England, too.
Angela Smith (Penistone and Stocksbridge) (Lab)
The right hon. Gentleman just mentioned the need to protect those most in need. Will he comment on the remarks by Blackpool’s Tory council leader, Peter Callow, who said:
“We are one of the most deprived areas in the land and we shouldn’t be singled out like this. I understand that some of the leafy lanes of Surrey and places have got away with it; well that can’t be right”?
Grant Shapps
The hon. Lady will no doubt welcome the £1 billion fund for regional assistance.
Grant Shapps
Which is new money and was announced last week. No doubt the hon. Lady in her next intervention will welcome that money, which would presumably go to areas such as that the one she describes.
Roberta Blackman-Woods (City of Durham) (Lab)
Will the right hon. Gentleman confirm that that £1 billion is additional funding—on top of the money that would already have been made available to RDAs and to local councils in order to support regeneration in their areas?
Grant Shapps
I may be living in a parallel universe, but I and Government Members were here last week for the Budget, when all that was described in a great deal of detail, including in the Red Book, which explains that the fund is new and comes out of the total spending envelope. It is fairly straightforward.
Let us make some progress. We will scrap Labour’s plans for new bin taxes, which meant even higher tax bills for local families and harmed the environment by encouraging more fly-tipping and more backyard burning. We need to go green, but we cannot have the bin bullies and the town hall Taliban who seemed to look after town halls before. Instead, we are going to embrace opt-in schemes, such as Windsor and Maidenhead’s recycle bank initiative, through which families are rewarded for recycling and doing the right thing. We will encourage people to do the right thing, rather than punish them when they do not.
Incentives can work for councils, too. Let us reward local authorities for driving economic performance in their area, and for building new homes. Incentives can work for councils in all sorts of ways.
Caroline Flint (Don Valley) (Lab)
On the issue of building new homes, I understand that one of the areas under threat is the Kickstart programme, which was to support private construction by getting sites that had fallen during the recession under way again. Does the Minister agree with the chairman of the Home Builders Federation, who said:
“Cutting Kickstart money, that creates immediate benefits in terms of local jobs and for the wider economy is a cut on investment not waste. Public money invested through Kickstart pulled in many more times that in private sector investment”?
Is there not a false economy in the cuts that are going ahead, which put more homes in jeopardy and do not make sense to the business community?
Grant Shapps
The right hon. Lady will share the concern that I had at turning up at a Ministry and being told that the £1.5 billion that had been presented to the Building Britain’s Future fund exactly a year ago, in July 2009 when programmes such as Kickstart were announced, just did not exist. We are now having to do what we can to support those important programmes. She can expect to hear further announcements on this front.
Andrea Leadsom (South Northamptonshire) (Con)
If all the programmes that the Opposition are concerned that we will cut were so valuable, why were so few houses built under the last Administration? Why are there 1 million people not in education, employment or training—NEETs—in this country if the programmes were working so well?
Grant Shapps
I am grateful to my hon. Friend, not least because of what happened in the debate on housing here just last week. The Opposition claim to be passionately interested in housing, but there was nobody at all on the Opposition Benches then: not a single Opposition Member turned up for a debate on a subject that they claim to care about so passionately.
Perhaps the answer lies in the figures on housing. We have only to look at the figures for house building last year, for example: fewer homes were built than during any peacetime period since 1924. It is not as if the top-down approach was working; the more the previous Government tried to centralise, dictate and impose housing on local communities, the fewer homes were built. That is why we intend to turn their policy on its head and ensure that in future incentives drive house performance and house building in this country.
Grant Shapps
I give way to the Chair of the Communities and Local Government Committee.
Mr Betts
Will the Minister clearly explain what his targets are for the number of social houses that should be built in this country each year? How will the building of such housing be achieved? What policy mechanisms will he use, and where is the funding to deliver the programme?
Grant Shapps
I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman. We are not going to set targets because they did not work. [Interruption.] There you go—they have heard it. We all remember the target of 3 million homes by 2020. Remember the former Prime Minister standing at this Dispatch Box and announcing that target? We all remember the 240,000 homes that were to be built every year. What is the figure for house building this year? Probably about 110,000 to 118,000—something in that region. There is no point in announcing targets that do not happen; all that does is bust aspiration. Instead, we will take a practical approach in which communities are encouraged with powerful financial incentives to build homes. Our matching of council tax revenues for a six-year period will achieve a great deal of that.
Grant Shapps
I want to make a bit of progress, then I shall give way again.
We are going to drive economic growth through local action and initiatives such as the incentive plan, and by replacing Lord Prescott’s and Lord Mandelson’s regional development agencies with locally led partnerships, based on natural economic areas—not arbitrary Government offices for the regions that happen to suit Ministers. We will also drive growth by giving councils new powers to levy business rate discounts for local shops and firms, by finding practical ways to introduce automatic small business rate relief and by abolishing Labour’s unfair ports tax, which threatened to harm the entire manufacturing sector in this country—at least the bit that the party had not already harmed through its economic policies.
We are doing all we can to help local government under difficult and pressing circumstances. No local authority will face a reduction of more than 2% in any revenue grant that has already been allocated.
Tristram Hunt (Stoke-on-Trent Central) (Lab)
Why does the council in my constituency face a cut of 1.08%, whereas no Government Member’s local authority is facing cuts of anywhere near that? Is that an act of ideology or malice? Or is it that, as the Minister with responsibility for planning said,
“Those in greatest need ultimately bear the burden of paying off the debt”.—[Official Report, 10 June 2010; Vol. 511, c. 450.]?
Grant Shapps
I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for that, but district councils all over the place are taking larger cuts. If the Opposition are now going to spend their time looking at random distributions, trying to pick out patterns and then playing them back, I am afraid that that just demonstrates that they really have not got it. They have not understood the financial crisis in which they had taken this country right to the edge, or appreciated the depth of the problems that they had taken the country into. That is clearly demonstrated by their input today.
Andrew Percy
The Minister will recall that a few moments ago, when I tried to raise the issue of school funding, my concerns about deprived areas such as those in Goole that I represent were laughed off with some smugness by Labour Members. Can we have an assurance that unlike the situation under the previous Government, who simply ignored the problem, pupils who live in very deprived areas in Goole will not be penalised for the simple reason that other parts of the East Riding are wealthier?
Grant Shapps
I am grateful to my hon. Friend. Of course, the pupil premium is designed to achieve precisely that. We are absolutely doing everything we can to try to protect people and share out the burden of the very difficult decisions that have to be made—decisions that were ducked by the Opposition when they were in government. Labour Members could not outline one penny of how they would have reduced the local government budget—not one single penny. I invite the right hon. Member for Southampton, Itchen to come to the Dispatch Box if he now wants to explain where the cuts were going to come from. Until Labour Members acknowledge that they had no answers and were not proposing alternatives, they will not have earned the right to lecture anybody about what should and should not be done by way of making these difficult cuts, because we have not heard anything about it from them.
We have protected the £29 billion formula grant—the main source of funding for front-line services such as rubbish collections, street cleaning and libraries. Moreover, we have not cut any of the main Supporting People budget, which is in excess of £1.6 billion, despite needing urgently to cut funds from this year.
John Hemming
Does the right hon. Gentleman share my mystification as to why Labour Members are fussing about whether there is a cut of 1.08% or 1.1%, given that the real situation is that over the next five years we potentially face cuts of 25% in real terms, and we should be planning and preparing for that now?
Grant Shapps
My hon. Friend is absolutely right. The simple truth is that Labour Members still have not understood the depth of the problems that they have got us into. Until they acknowledge that and start to address it themselves with some real plans, and identify where some of the money is coming from, nobody will take seriously their complaining and calling of Opposition day debates about this subject.
We will continue to remove the ring fences from non-school revenue and capital funding. This year, we have de-ring-fenced £1.2 billion, and we intend to go a lot further. This gives councils the extra flexibility they need to concentrate on local priorities and to protect these front-line services. We are also reducing the management burden imposed on local authorities from the centre, cutting down on undemocratic and unaccountable quangos, and putting local government front and centre in meeting local residents’ needs. When we took over, there were 27 different quangos relating to the Department for Communities and Local Government. Again, I invite the shadow Secretary of State to come to the Dispatch Box and explain how he was going to hand power back to local people by removing even one of his 27 quangos.
As with every profession, local authorities will need to take some difficult decisions about how to prioritise their spending. Local authorities have already made great strides in achieving efficiencies, but they need to do more. There is still a lot more potential to gain through new practices—for example, shared services, joint working and smarter procurement. Perhaps most important, however, will be radical town hall transformation. We must be clear that councils will need to build in improved productivity as a matter of course. They need to learn from the best commercial practices. Sainsbury’s does not go out and tell people that good food costs more when it comes from Sainsbury’s, but that it costs less, and public services are going to have to do the same thing. In the public services, in future, we have to get more for less. I know that that is a concept that Labour Members struggle with, but it is the reality of the financial mess that they have left us in.
Brandon Lewis (Great Yarmouth) (Con)
I am proud that in Great Yarmouth our council, which faces a 2% cut, has reacted by saying, “We can deal with this. We realise the situation that the previous Government has left us with, and we’ve got to get more efficiencies.” That is a good and positive move forward. In my view, having spent many years as a councillor and council leader, the best thing for our councils is to get rid of some of the ring-fencing and the tick-box culture that wastes officers’ and members’ time and give them back the ability to make real decisions about real things locally, which means they are more accountable and that our residents will care more about what they do. Does the Minister agree?
Grant Shapps
I am most grateful to my hon. Friend, who gives us an opportunity to talk about matters such as the comprehensive area assessments, which somehow, through ticking boxes and using—[Interruption.] The hon. Member for Hammersmith (Mr Slaughter) says from a sedentary position that we have done all that, but the truth is that £39 million was still being spent on that budget on the day we entered office.
Rather than having a tick-box culture, in which town halls are answerable to Ministers, there is a better way, and it is the one that my hon. Friend the Member for Great Yarmouth (Brandon Lewis) has identified—local people being the ones to whom officers are answerable, through the ballot box. That is a radical concept that can be expanded much further by allowing councils, by the end of this year, to publish online details of all their spending, tenders and contracts over £500. That will be proper transparency and empower a new army of armchair auditors to go through local authorities’ books and help identify wasteful spending, helping to protect front-line services. [Interruption.] I hear Opposition Members calling out, “Well, that will help.” As a matter of fact, we really do think that it will help in a dramatic way, and I will explain why.
We are going to extend the idea to national Government with a higher limit of £25,000, and this is how it will work. In my Department alone, openness and publishing this stuff online would have avoided, for example, the scandal of £134,000 being spent on 28 luxury socialist-red sofas by a Parisian designer, Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec, which were bought as part of new Labour’s—get this—efficiency initiative. That pretty much sums up its approach.
Transparency would, I imagine, also have stopped the scandal of my Department spending £73,000 on a serene green tranquillity room for stressed-out staff and Ministers to
“relax and refuel in a natural ebb and flow.”
Proper accountability would surely have stopped the £6,000-apiece deluxe chrome coffee machines fitted at each of the white elephant regional fire control rooms, which are completely empty, by the way. Come hell or high water, we would at least have known in future that officials would have had a nice cup of cappuccino even as disaster struck and the phone system failed, as it famously does in those buildings. That is what transparency and openness will deliver—it will mean that people can see what is going on inside government, both nationally and locally.
Mr Slaughter
I wish the Secretary of State had bothered to come, partly because this is so incoherent and we might have had something a bit better, but mainly because I wanted to pay him a compliment for proposing to cut a bit of town hall waste. He said at the weekend:
“Councils should spend less time and money on weekly town hall Pravdas…our free press should not face state competition from propaganda on the rates dressed up as local reporting”.
My Conservative council spends £750,000 on just that type of propaganda. When will the Government cut that, and in addition to consulting the councils themselves, when will they consult local people, MPs and newspapers about the problem? It is a disgrace.
Grant Shapps
I thank the hon. Gentleman for his particularly eloquent contribution. Local authorities spending their time publishing weekly newspapers, or weekly Pravdas as the Secretary of State described them, is just not their role. We talk about front-line services, supporting people, homelessness and priority programmes to ensure that the sick, elderly and vulnerable are protected, but Opposition Members want to talk about local weekly Pravda newspapers published by local authorities. It simply is not the answer. What we want to do is ensure that local authorities are engaged in front-line services that help their population, not services that rival the local newspapers. We want to allow the local newspapers to operate without interference from local authorities.
Everyone knows that money is tight. Every strategy that we employ nationally and locally should focus on getting more for less. Innovation and efficiency must be king. The emergency Budget makes it clear that there are challenging times ahead. We want to ensure that local government is fully engaged with the next spending review. In particular, we expect councils to be involved in the series of events over the summer to discuss and debate various aspects of public spending. We will use the spending review to drive decentralisation across local government and national Government.
Toby Perkins
The Minister has said a couple of times that councils will have to do more for less. As a member of the best value and efficiency scrutiny panel on Chesterfield borough council for the past seven years, I know just how hard our council and many others worked to produce the efficiencies demanded under Gershon. Can the Minister tell us of any council leaders who have not been trying to give more for less in the last years of the Labour Government?
Grant Shapps
I accept that the hon. Gentleman and local authority leaders and councils throughout the country work hard to do those things. However, sometimes just doing something in a closed situation is not enough and we have to invite the whole general public to take part. We need to publish the stuff online, make it fully transparent and let people see what is really going on. As I explained in the context of my Department’s responsibilities, if that had been done, I do not believe that those tens of thousands—and even hundreds of thousands—of pounds would have been wasted on pointless projects. On a smaller scale, there will be examples in town halls throughout the country of money being spent on unsustainable projects, which best value committees sometimes do not reach, but a large army of armchair auditors will. It is called the general public; it is called transparency, and it will work effectively.
Chris Leslie
Will the Department also publish items that cost £500, so that the position between local government and central Government is fair?
Grant Shapps
Central Government obviously have a large budget—[Hon. Members: “Ah!”] They do have a large budget, so the limit will initially be set at £25,000—[Interruption.] Opposition Members are making a great deal of noise, but each of the projects that I mentioned a moment ago would have been captured under such a system. We would have known about the red sofas, the tranquillity centre and all the adverse expenditure. That would have helped. One has to wonder at the Opposition—after 13 years without such transparency and openness, when the coalition offers to open up government, they just want us to go further. That is fantastic, but they had 13 years in which to go much further, but they did not and they wasted taxpayers’ money.
The coalition agreement makes it clear what to expect. The time has come to transfer power away from Westminster and Whitehall into the hands of communities and individuals. We will make rapid progress because we have already announced several shake-ups of power. The move to a more democratic planning system will sweep away arbitrary top-down targets and hated regional spatial strategies, introducing powerful financial incentives to local people instead.
The previous Housing Minister is no longer in the Chamber, but I am a fan of his blog. I note that this week he writes:
“DCLG ministers are changing the planning system.”
He adds:
“Ours was too top-down”.
Hon. Members can read that online—a road to Damascus conversion from Labour, now in opposition. The new coalition intends to prove that Ministers can be localist in government, just as we can in opposition. There will be no switch-around.
Dr Alan Whitehead (Southampton, Test) (Lab)
In the spirit of transparency, will the Minister confirm that the £1 billion fund that he mentioned earlier is the regional growth fund to fund regional capital projects in 2011-12 and 2012-13, to which the Red Book refers? If so, the Red Book mentions no figures, but he has gone a little further. Would he care to speculate on whether he will decide who gets the regional growth fund, or will he hand it over to local authorities to determine their own regional capital projects?
Grant Shapps
Yes, that is the same fund, and it was mentioned to the House verbally, at the Dispatch Box, by the Chancellor on the day. No, I cannot confirm how it will be divided up. Members would quite properly expect that to be announced in a statement to the House from the Dispatch Box, and they would not expect me to do that today, because today’s debate—[Interruption.] It is a bit rich of Labour Members to express surprise. We had 13 years of spin and statements on every breakfast TV sofa in the country but, now that they have now switched sides and gone into opposition, they are making a big deal of this. I can assure the hon. Member for Southampton, Test (Dr Whitehead) that that statement will be made to the House from the Dispatch Box in due course.
Claire Perry
I am fascinated by the disclosure about the tranquillity room. I have had many people coming into my surgery recently who have been really struggling with their household budgets and housing problems. The idea of a tranquillity room is quite entertaining, but it is also deeply insulting to hard-working British people. How will the Minister use the tranquillity room? What does he intend to do with it?
Grant Shapps
I think that it would be only right to invite people to come and try out the tranquillity room. It was paid for with the hard-earned money of the people outside the House, when the previous Government seemed to think that it was a good idea to spend hard-earned taxpayers’ money on building tranquillity rooms and putting in expensive sofas. This is an indication of how they talked about helping the poor when they were really helping themselves by refurbishing their offices with bizarre and extraordinary furniture.
Gavin Barwell
Has my right hon. Friend been able to ascertain whether the room was given ministerial approval and, if so, which Minister gave that approval?
Grant Shapps
I cannot tell my hon. Friend how the approval process used to work, but I can tell him that, in the new Department for Communities and Local Government, that kind of expenditure would never be signed off without someone political taking the decision right from the outset.
We have announced that we will move away from the wasteful inefficiency of central targets and towards incentives involving more carrot and much less stick. Last week, we scrapped the comprehensive area assessment, saving the taxpayer £39 million.
Mr Blunkett
It will help us over the next five years if the right hon. Gentleman can give us an answer to this question. Is he seriously suggesting that every sum over £5,000 spent in government will be individually signed off by a Government Minister?
Grant Shapps
No, I did not mention the figure of £5,000, but I did say that decisions approaching anything like the levels of the £134,000 spent on Parisian-designed sofas would require sign-off—and they would not get that sign-off, either.
We have introduced a Bill to stop council restructuring in Devon, Norfolk and Suffolk, which will save the taxpayer £40 million of unnecessary costs. This was a botched restructuring; even the accounting officer at the DCLG had no confidence in it, and issued a letter of direction to the former Secretary of State about it. There was no reason to spend that £40 million, but the Labour Government did not believe that the country was in a financial mess. They seemed to miss that point entirely.
There is more to come. We will promote locally led joint working, building not just on the Total Place pilots, but on innovations—such as joint chief executives— being championed by many councils. In the Queen’s Speech, we announced a localism Bill that will free local government from central control and give voters more power over local government and over the way in which money is spent. As part of this, we will introduce a new general power of competence for local authorities, so that they are free to give local communities exactly what they want.
The public coffers are nearly empty, and the nation’s credit card is maxed out. Shadow Ministers are fighting the wars of yesterday, trying to justify why their pet projects were notionally signed off by the Treasury, but ignoring the huge elephant in the room, in the form of a looming public debt of £1.4 trillion. But in these tough times, we are defending the interests of families, pensioners, small firms and the underprivileged. We are empowering councils to put the front line first, and to make the right choices on how best to protect the vulnerable and the needy in our society. We are putting councillors and the people in charge of going through the state books and highlighting waste and inefficiency, rather than relying on unelected and unaccountable quangos and regional structures. There is a difference between this Government and the last one: we trust people. That is something that the centralising, nanny-state, interfering Labour Government never did.