Local Government Funding

Helen Hayes Excerpts

Wednesday 28th March 2018 Commons Chamber

[Sajid Javid]

I will give way in a moment.

It has taken titanic efforts to turn the situation round and rebuild our economy, with both central and local government having to find new ways of delivering essential services while delivering value for money. The country cannot afford a return to Labour’s ways of spend, borrow and bust.

[Helen Hayes (Dulwich and West Norwood) (Lab)]

rose—

[Sajid Javid]

Perhaps this is another hon. Lady who wants to apologise.

[Helen Hayes]

I was not planning to intervene on the Secretary of State, as I am hoping to speak later, but the hon. Member for Lewes (Maria Caulfield) talked about Labour’s proposals for a land value tax, and I want to correct the record on that. The Housing, Communities and Local Government Committee is currently undertaking a cross-party inquiry into the merits of the land value tax, which has been tried and tested in many European countries and which has many variants. I hope that the Secretary of State will take seriously the recommendations of the Select Committee when we report in due course.

[Sajid Javid]

The hon. Lady gives me the opportunity to highlight Labour’s tax plans once again. She says that Labour is not considering a land value tax, but perhaps she is not aware of what Councillor Sharon Taylor of the Local Government Association Labour group said just a few days ago, on 20 March. She said that she would like to see increased freedoms for councils from day one of Labour Government and that this should include

“the ability to look at local taxes such as land value tax”

and a tourism tax. Labour’s plans are all about tax, tax, tax. That is the only thing it knows.

There is no doubt that local authorities are stepping up to the challenges that they face and demonstrating real ambition and creativity to drive efficiencies at the same time as protecting frontline services. Let me share a few examples with the House. Suffolk County Council has used advanced technology to understand what is behind the service pressures generated by troubled families. Since that work began, the council has saved some £10 million and increased the capacity of its system to focus on priority cases. South Cambridgeshire has set up its own housing company to provide innovative solutions to meet local housing need. The company will expand its portfolio of properties, investing approximately £100 million over the next five years. This will generate an additional £600,000 per annum for the council.

Many councils have taken a more radical approach to restructuring to do better for their communities. The benefits can be enormous when local areas look beyond lines on a map and party differences and find new ways to work together. That is what Suffolk Coastal and Waveney district councils have done to create a new district council: East Suffolk. That culmination of years of collaboration is expected to yield annual savings of more than £2 million. There are also mergers of Forest Heath and St Edmundsbury to form West Suffolk, which is estimated to generate a saving of over £500,000 each year, and of West Somerset and Taunton Deane to form Somerset West and Taunton, which will lead to transformational change and annual savings of some £3 million.

--- Later in debate ---

[Helen Hayes (Dulwich and West Norwood) (Lab)]

I was elected to Southwark Council in 2010—just as the Tory-Lib Dem coalition Government came to power—and I served on the council until May 2016. We knew in 2010 that David Cameron and George Osborne’s response to the impact of the global financial crash would shrink the size of government at the expense of vulnerable people and that things were not going to be easy. We knew that funding was going to be cut and that there would be difficult decisions to make as a consequence. However, we could not have anticipated just how much the burden of Lib Dem-Tory austerity would be made to fall on local councils.

Both the councils that serve my constituency—Lambeth and Southwark—have lost more than 50% of their grant from central Government. Lambeth alone has had to make savings of more than £200 million. In that context, both Labour councils have been striving to continue to protect local services, to continue to deliver for local residents and to act as a shield between their local communities and the Government’s austerity programme.

Lambeth has protected funding for specialist women’s refuge services, which is in contrast with other parts of the country, where 17% of specialist refuges have closed since 2010. Lambeth has maintained a commitment to some of the most vulnerable women in our community. Such services are largely invisible to all but those who rely on them, and I am extremely proud of Lambeth’s commitment.

Southwark has sustained a commitment made in 2010—in the face of vociferous opposition from local Lib Dems and Tories—to fund universal free school meals for primary-age children. Unlike this Government and their partial, miserly approach to free school meals, Southwark has recognised the benefits that come in attainment and social development from ensuring that every child in the borough has at least one healthy hot meal a day, that children from diverse backgrounds eat together, and that no child is stigmatised because of poverty.

Both councils were among the earliest adopters of Unison’s ethical care charter for social care, which is a commitment to pay all care workers the London living wage and to ensure that they are paid for travel between appointments, have sufficient time to care and are well trained. That is a commitment to fairness and to doing the right thing by the borough’s most vulnerable residents despite, not because of, the Government’s approach.

I am proud of those commitments and of the thoughtfulness and hard work of both councillors and council staff that has gone into delivering them. Lambeth and Southwark have shown remarkable resilience and commitment, but both are under intolerable pressure—pressure also experienced by councils across the country—and Government Members who doubt the severity of the crisis must listen to the words of their Conservative council colleagues. Sir Paul Carter, the Conservative leader of Kent County Council recently told the Housing, Communities and Local Government Committee:

“Local government and county councils, which have had the steepest financial challenge of any part of local government, have done extraordinarily well to help national Government start to restore the country’s public finances. We are all finding now that we really are eating into the bone”.

He went on to say that

“there are so many unfunded pressures that are building up across the piece in local government...The elastic is fully stretched.”

The Conservative chair of the LGA, Lord Porter, commenting on the Government’s decision to allow councils to raise council tax, said:

“The extra income this year will help offset some of the financial pressures they face but the reality is that many councils are now beyond the point where council tax income can be expected to plug the growing funding gaps they face.”

Those are the words, not of the Government’s political opponents, but of its friends in local government—councillors who have campaigned to get Conservative MPs elected—who clearly agree that the Government have quite simply been weaponising local councils to mete out the misery of its austerity agenda.

As I pay tribute to my Labour councils for their commitment to shielding our local communities from austerity as best they can in impossible circumstances, I call on the Government to recognise the vital role that local government plays, to heed the warnings from their own council colleagues, and to adopt an approach that seeks to empower local authorities, who know their communities best, to take decisions in the interests of the residents they serve.