Oral Answers to Questions
Debate between Grant Shapps and Helen Jones
The Minister for Housing and Local Government (Grant Shapps)
I am aware of the excellent Portas pilot bid by my hon. Friend’s town team. I wish it well, along with the other 350 or so bids that are still in the competition. As I mentioned, an announcement will be made before the end of this month.
Helen Jones (Warrington North) (Lab)
Properly targeted and funded family intervention works, so why have the Government introduced a half-baked scheme based on research that fails to distinguish between poor families and those involved in antisocial behaviour? Why do they refuse to give details of their cost estimates on the spurious grounds that the spending of public money is commercially sensitive? Is it not because they want to disguise the fact that they have slashed services such as Sure Start and youth intervention programmes, which really make a difference, and the fact that councils will get back only a tiny fraction of the millions that they have already lost?
Local Government Finance
Debate between Grant Shapps and Helen Jones(12 years, 9 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text
Grant Shapps
My hon. Friend is absolutely right. While he tries to expand his argument to cover measures such as the un-ring-fencing of some £7 billion of expenditure each year, it is revealing that the Labour party does not want to acknowledge that we are living in tough times. They do not acknowledge that we have done a series of things, including keeping councils in four different bands, each with a different floor level, and ensuring that the most dependent areas see their funding fall by proportionately less overall.
Helen Jones (Warrington North) (Lab)
The Minister’s argument totally ignores the differences between council tax bases in different authorities, and the amounts that authorities can raise from a similar rise in council tax. On business rates, he is ignoring the fact that all predictions show that even if top-ups and tariffs are uprated by the retail prices index, the gap between the wealthiest local authorities and the poorest will grow under the Government’s plans.
Grant Shapps
This measure will ensure that local authorities have a stake in the economic well-being of people in their communities—the person living behind the door at No. 22 or wherever—and in whether they can get back into work and off welfare, for example. It is absolutely right to localise council tax benefit, simply because it gives the local authority a stake in helping that person back to work. At the moment, the money goes directly from the centre to the individual, and the local authority does not play a part. In the same way, the local authority currently has no stake in attracting more businesses to an area or in building more homes.
Helen Jones
Will the Minister admit that 80% of economic development is down not to what local authorities do but to what the Government do—or, in this case, what they do not do. He is making the mistake, again, of assuming that people receiving council tax benefit are all out of work. The people who will be hardest hit by his scheme will be poor families in work.
Grant Shapps
First, I think that 80% of business development comes from businesses, not from government, whether local or central, but we might just have a different view about that. Secondly, it is hard to take historical figures, such as the hon. Lady’s 80% figure, and project them forward, simply because we do not know what will happen. We have created in this country a local government finance system entirely divorced from economic realities. Frankly, under the current system, it has made no difference to councils whether businesses have survived or thrived in their local areas. That is wrong, and that is what we will turn around. It is absolutely right to do that.
Helen Jones
My hon. Friend makes a good point, and I shall be dealing with that matter in a moment. The Government could have worked with local authorities to use that purchasing power, but what they failed to understand was that when it is cut too far, too fast, those local companies do not expand—they contract or go bust. The Government, while taking that approach, have taken away every lever local authorities had to help their local economies. Nottingham alone lost £6.5 million from the scrapping of the future jobs fund. My hon. Friend the Member for Denton and Reddish has mentioned Tameside—[Interruption.] If the Minister wants to intervene, I will be happy to let him.
Grant Shapps
Will the hon. Lady repeat something we heard for the first time in the Chamber a couple of hours ago, which is that those on the Front Bench deplore the fact that Nottingham city council will not publish its expenditure online?
Helen Jones
We believe that all councils should publish their expenditure and we would like the DCLG to set an example by not being so far behind the curve in publishing its expenditure, too.
The Government took away the community growth fund and abolished regional development agencies. Scandalously, they will not even let local authorities participate in the Work programme so that the very people who understand their local communities best and have long-term relationships with local businesses are excluded from it. That is the problem with this settlement. It is sending local areas, many of them the most deprived in the country, into a spiral of decline. People are facing cuts to services, increases in charges and a loss of jobs.
Some 129,000 local government jobs have already gone and more than 700,000 are likely to go. What happens then? Those people cannot spend money in the local economy, so private businesses lose revenue and as they suffer they lay people off. Local councils are locked in a spiral of more and more demands on their services and less and less revenue. That is why we oppose this settlement. It is unfair, it hits the poorest most and, most of all, it is economically illiterate. I urge my hon. Friends to oppose it tonight.