Funding for Local Authorities

Helen Goodman Excerpts

Thursday 10th October 2013 Commons Chamber

[Angela Smith (Penistone and Stocksbridge) (Lab)]

I will preface my comments by referring to the speech made by the hon. Member for Tiverton and Honiton (Neil Parish). For reasons I will outline, I do not believe that the real debate should be about rural versus urban areas. I believe that it should be about the fact that local government is being asked to bear the austerity cuts being applied by the coalition Government. That is the real issue.

I wish to put on the record my congratulations to Councillor Steven Houghton, leader of Barnsley council, on recently being raised to Knight Bachelor for services to local government, a well-deserved honour. Steve Houghton has got to be one of the best leaders we have in local government. He has done a great deal to develop local government in this country, including designing the future jobs fund, which has now been abandoned.

Like many other right hon. and hon. Members, I was a local councillor before entering Parliament. I was a member of my local council for nine years and was very proud to be a councillor and a cabinet member for education. I now represent the constituency of Penistone and Stocksbridge, which straddles two metropolitan local authorities, Barnsley council and Sheffield city council. It is an incredibly diverse constituency. A large part of it is rural. Indeed, it contains much of the north-eastern aspect of the peak district national park—it does not get any more rural than a national park—within its boundaries. But other parts of the constituency would best be described as semi-rural, suburban and urban.

In other words, the constituency spreads from the fringes of urban Barnsley and urban Sheffield right out into the valleys of the peak district. In the rural western part of the constituency, one finds all the usual issues: the needs of local farmers and other typical problems, such as lack of access to high-speed internet or a decent bus service, and there are all the other issues relating to affordable housing, employment and access to work.

However, other parts of my constituency, such as the old pit villages of High Green and Dodworth face challenges common to former coalfield areas, as the disappearance of what was essentially a key economic activity rooted in villages has left a huge vacuum in employment and, in High Green, severe social problems. Then there are the urban areas in Sheffield, which carry with them all the seemingly intractable problems we have seen emerge since the deindustrialisation of the 1980s.

[Helen Goodman (Bishop Auckland) (Lab)]

My constituency is similarly dispersed. Does my hon. Friend agree that the cost of services in rural areas is far higher, and was not she, like me, appalled to hear Tory Councillor Nick Worth of Lincolnshire county council defending the closure of more than half the libraries in Lincolnshire?

[Angela Smith]

I completely agree. The closure of libraries really worries me. We face similar levels of closure in Sheffield. We are not applauding or welcoming those closures; we are having to deal with the terrible impact that we know they will have in our area. But we know that the reasons for those closures lie with the lack of funding from central Government.

I have sketched my constituency not because I want to wax lyrical about the area I represent, but because I want to establish a key point that is all too often overlooked when we consider what I call provincial England, meaning England outside London. For too long the debate has been unhelpful, sitting on a platform that polarises the arguments. For too long the argument has been about rural areas versus urban areas, as though the two are literally miles apart. Nothing could be further from the truth, as my constituency exemplifies. As I have already said, I represent deeply rural areas located firmly within a metropolitan borough. I represent rural areas that in the past have supported engineering and coal, railways and ceramics as well as the vital agriculture industry.

My plea to the Chamber today is this: let us start having a more rational and pragmatic debate about the role of local government, let us stop dividing our country up into areas of interest, and let us start representing properly the interests of all the people of England. Let us not have a debate in which we say, “My rural area isn’t getting enough from the Government, so let’s cut the funding for the metropolitan boroughs.” Let us properly recognise that most parts of England, including the metropolitan boroughs, are more complicated than appears to be the case when we just look at a title such as “Sheffield city council.”