Hazel Blears
Main Page: Hazel Blears (Labour - Salford and Eccles)
Mr Denham
My right hon. Friend, as always, is absolutely right.
I must say that this debate is turning out to be rather more useful than I expected. Just a small scratch on the surface of the Government’s supporters tells us what they really believe, stand for and intend to do. As a number of Members have said, this has got nothing to do with the economic crisis or the deficit; they just think that our spending more money in the areas of greatest need was the wrong thing to do. Let us agree that that is the difference between the Government and the Opposition.
Hazel Blears (Salford and Eccles) (Lab)
I wonder whether my right hon. Friend is experiencing, as I am, a slightly spooky feeling of déjà vu. If we think about political gerrymandering, we all remember the days when Westminster and Wandsworth were able to levy zero council tax because of the fix that had been done on the allocation and distribution of grant. What we are seeing from Government Members is history replaying itself. We are seeing not a new, centrist, Cameron-friendly Tory party but the same old right-wing Tories, determined to balance the books on the backs of the poor.
Mr Denham
My right hon. Friend is right. She too has done the job that I did until the election, and she knows that there are many people in local government who are not of our party, but who have a genuine commitment to the communities they serve and by whom they were elected. Among the people who have been kicked in the teeth by these budget cuts are the locally elected representatives of this Government. The Tory leader of Blackpool council said:
“We are one of the most deprived areas in the land and we shouldn’t be singled out like this.”
He had better not go to the East Riding or Bromsgrove, because he will get a different message. He continued:
“I understand that some of the leafy lanes of Surrey and places have got away with it; well that can’t be right.”
The Lib Dem leader of Burnley council said:
“we are a deprived borough but once again we are suffering. I am disappointed and sick of us being kicked by budget cuts in Burnley.”
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.
Hazel Blears (Salford and Eccles) (Lab)
I congratulate the hon. Member for Wolverhampton South West (Paul Uppal) on his maiden speech, which he delivered with grace and a sense of humour. I am delighted that he is the first Sikh Conservative Member and wish him the greatest of success. Grace and a sense of humour might well be qualities that will stand him in good stead in the coming months. I also congratulate you on taking up your position, Madam Deputy Speaker. I have no doubt that you will be a great champion of us Back Benchers.
When I came to this debate I thought, “Local government finance? It’s going to be bland, techie, full of references to area-based grant, formula grant, specific grants, ratios and numbers,” but I have been pleasantly surprised, because the debate has been lively and, on occasions, combative. That is quite right, because it shows how much all of us care about our local authorities and how important the services are to the people whom we represent. We must never forget that, behind all the technical jargon that we sometimes hear, we are talking about people who are struggling to bring up their children; people who are often trying to hang on to a job; people who are sometimes caring for their elderly parents, with the tremendous stress that that puts them under; and people who are looking constantly for work in this difficult economic climate.
Under this Tory-Liberal Democrat Government—I refuse to call it a coalition, because it is what it is, a Tory-Liberal Democrat Government—the prospects look extremely worrying. We have already had £6 billion of cuts, but the hon. Member for Birmingham, Yardley (John Hemming) said that that is not a great deal of money and does not know what we are all worried about. Well, I can tell him this: to my local authority it is a great deal of money. It is significant, but I have no doubt that further bad news is on its way, and that tremendous cuts will be made in the autumn. If they are signified by the same unfairness and north-south divide that we have already seen, Opposition Members will have a great deal to worry about. [Interruption.] I am delighted to welcome the Secretary of State, who has just taken up his seat on the Treasury Bench. I trust that he has hurried back from Bradford, and at the end of my speech I shall make a couple of remarks in which he might take a personal interest.
The Deputy Prime Minister once said that he wanted to see deep and savage cuts, and then he rowed back from that tremendously. However, he is about to have his wish fulfilled, and that is a bleak prospect. He also said:
“There will be no return to the kind of cuts we saw in the Thatcherite 1980s”;
“We’re not going to allow a great north-south divide to reappear”;
and, most interestingly of all, that
“the coalition will ensure that the cuts are fair and we will protect the poorest and the most vulnerable.”
He is wrong on all counts. He will face not only the wrath of his enraged constituents in Sheffield, quite rightly given his decision on Sheffield Forgemasters, but the anger of families throughout the country who will feel the brunt of the cuts that are made in local government services.
The Minister for Housing, the right hon. Member for Welwyn Hatfield (Grant Shapps), who opened the debate, claimed that the Government were essentially about fairness, and we heard about them wanting to hard-wire fairness into the country’s DNA. Let us straight away end that myth about fairness. Salford still has high levels of deprivation, but we are going to lose 1.1% of our budget, and Salford is of course Labour controlled. If we look at the different impact of the cuts on neighbouring Trafford, which is Tory controlled, we see just how fair those cuts are.
Compared with Trafford, Salford has double the number of people on housing benefit and council tax benefit; 3,000 more unemployed people; average earnings that are £40 a week less; and almost double the number of children in workless households. So, how is it fair for the coalition to reduce Salford’s budget by 1.1% compared with a cut of just 0.6% in Trafford? How is it fair that Salford loses £3.5 million and Trafford just £1.5 million? That cannot be fair, because we in Salford have made considerable progress since 1997. We have seen a huge fall in unemployment throughout our area, but people are still looking for jobs, and we need to get them back to work. We will not do that, however, by cutting the council’s funding to tackle worklessness. The working neighbourhoods fund—cut. The future jobs fund—cut. That is short-sighted and damaging and will crush the hopes of many young people in our communities.
Angela Smith
Will my right hon. Friend comment on the fact that the working neighbourhoods fund areas account for 71% of the reductions in incapacity benefit claimants since 2004?
Hazel Blears
My hon. Friend has made the extremely important point that despite what some Government Members have said, the working neighbourhoods fund is a long-term programme that is beginning to get results. We are seeing from the evaluation that it works in an intensive, neighbourhood-focused way and is getting people from some of the most difficult cases of intergenerational unemployment back into work. What do we see now? We see a Government who profess to want to reform the welfare system and get people back into work cutting the very programmes that can succeed in our communities.
Nicky Morgan (Loughborough) (Con)
Perhaps I misheard, but I thought the shadow Secretary of State said earlier that if his Government had been returned, there would have been £40 billion of cuts from their side of the House. Would any of the schemes that the right hon. Lady has just mentioned have been affected, or would other schemes, on which people also rely, have been cut instead?
Hazel Blears
We would have made cuts because of the deficit; we have been absolutely straightforward about that. However, we would not have taken an extra £40 billion out of the economy while the recovery was fragile. Wanting to get rid of the deficit totally in the space of one Parliament is reckless and damaging. We will see the effects in each of our communities in the months and years to come.
The one thing that I think we would have protected are the programmes to get people back to work. If we get people back to work, they will pay tax and national insurance and we will not pay out for them in benefits. That is basic common sense. Cutting the future jobs fund and the working neighbourhoods fund, and making sure that the young people involved face the dole, is totally the wrong approach.
We have said that there should be no return to the 1980s. I remember that, in the 1980s, two of my wards in Salford had 50% male unemployment—half the men were out of work. There was 70% youth unemployment. That sounds Dickensian now; it sounds like 100 years ago, but it was not. It was only in the 1980s, as a result of that last Tory recession. There is no way in the world that we Labour Members want to go back to those days.
In Salford, we were also eagerly awaiting a Kickstart bus service. That sounds like a small affair, but it would have linked the whole of the outer part of Salford with MediaCity and Salford Quays. There are fantastic opportunities in MediaCity for getting new jobs in the creative and digital industries. We need to have public transport, so that people in our outlying areas can take advantage of those new jobs. That bus service is now under threat as a result of the cuts. Does it not make sense to fund a bus service to enable people to access the jobs on offer, instead of asking—or even forcing—them to move home? That is simple, basic common sense, but the provision is going to be cut.
We have seen cuts of £600 million in the housing programme, £300 million of that in the market renewal pathfinder programmes: all are targeted at low-demand areas in the north of England. Again, we are seeing the Thatcherite cuts and the north-south divide, with a disproportionate effect on northern cities. We are also likely to see damaging cuts to the police services. If there are going to be 25% cuts—at the Home Office, for example—that will involve about 4,000 police community support officers. The Minister who will wind up the debate is a Greater Manchester Member of Parliament. I should like to hear from him just what effect the cuts will have on the number of PCSOs in Greater Manchester; as I am sure he will know, PCSOs are hugely valued by the community.
As the Secretary of State knows, I am always a constructive politician. I should like to say a word or two about the Total Place programme, which I set up when I was Secretary of State. It is not simply about squeezing out efficiencies—yes, it is about bringing back-office services together, having call centres, not having 10 personnel departments and not duplicating all our services, but it is also about much more than that. It is about integrating services, redesigning the whole way in which public services work, bringing together the budgets of policing, health, education, regeneration and economic development and saying to a local area, “That’s your total budget. What are your priorities? What do you want to get out of that investment?” The local area then has the freedom to decide.
In Cumbria, total public expenditure on all those services is about £6 billion. That is a lot of money by anybody’s reckoning, and I genuinely believe that if there is imagination and creativity about public service reform, we can make some cuts and big savings without necessarily affecting the front-line services on which all our people depend. Today I found out from the Library that the figure in Greater Manchester is £22 billion. If we bring together health, education and policing in Greater Manchester, we will see that we are often dealing with the same families with multiple problems, each relating to those public services.
When I was policing Minister and responsible for antisocial behaviour, we brought in the family intervention projects. We were spending £250,000 on each of the families involved; multiple interventions were not really changing their behaviour. When we got one worker with sufficient clout in the system to get health, education and policing all working together, the families cost us about £30,000. We called the worker a “muscular social worker”—and I can tell Members that they had to be pretty muscular. Doing that saved money, and 80% of the families changed their behaviour sufficiently for them no longer to face eviction for antisocial behaviour. The initiative saved money, it was commonsensical and it worked.
I urge the Government not to look at Total Place as simply an administrative efficiency measure; it is actually about fundamental service redesign. The Department for Communities and Local Government will need to press every other part of the Government to get on board. We have all tried our best, but Government Departments build empires and take power back to themselves. If we simply have cuts across the board without using our intellect and imagination, we will not make the progress that we want.
The Secretary of State has said that his priorities are localism, localism and localism. What we have seen today has given the lie to that. There has been no consultation with local government about the cuts. There has been no transparency; we do not know where £500 million of cuts are going to fall. There has been no involvement of local people. The Secretary of State’s promise has proved about as meaningful as the Liberal Democrat pledge on VAT. He has a long way to go.
The cuts are a bit like those of the 1980s, as they are targeted on the poorest. There is at least one other consistency. When the Secretary of State was leader of Bradford city council, he was known—perhaps not entirely affectionately—as “the beast of Bradford”. Teachers, caretakers, maintenance workers, crèche and nursery staff, social workers and council officers all lost their jobs. His ambition was to cut £50 million from the council budget and turn it into a holding company that met two or three times a year when the contracts would be handed out. Under the control of the right hon. Gentleman, Bradford city council was described as an example of Thatcherism at its most red-blooded. I wonder whether he told the people of Bradford this morning what he had in store for them. Heaven knows what he has in store for us, but we Labour Members will protect the poorest and most vulnerable, who depend on our council services. We will have no return to the Thatcherite 1980s.