James Morris
Main Page: James Morris (Conservative - Halesowen and Rowley Regis)(13 years, 9 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text
Mr Pickles
I will give way in a few moments.
The phasing of the settlement will be challenging. Councils can choose how they respond. Some have chosen to wring their hands and say that it is all too hard, or to play politics with front-line services. Others have chosen to step up and to protect vital local services, reducing every trace of waste, protecting the most vulnerable and reforming services to deliver better results for less.
Caroline Flint
I do not know how to follow the hon. Gentleman’s intervention, because it is a good example of the grandstanding that has been going on. I should love the hon. Gentleman to send me the figures from Hampshire county council. Seven million pounds a year? I should very much like to see those figures, because I am not sure that they relate only to senior executive pay.
I have made it clear that I am not standing up for those who pay over the odds. [Interruption.] I have made that very clear, as the Minister for Housing and Local Government will see if he consults Hansard. What I am saying is that it is a distraction to suggest that the sort of cuts in executive pay that I have described, whether they involve 50% of chief executives or 25% of the senior management team, can make a significant dent in the savings that councils are having to find.
We are often told that if councils cannot use their reserves and if cuts in executive pay are not enough, they can make their savings by sharing services or merging back-room functions. Let us leave aside the fact that more than 200 councils are already sharing services or facilities, or are planning to do that. If creative service redesign could protect services and stop unnecessary job losses we would support it, as would our local Labour colleagues, but by front-loading the cuts as the Secretary of State has chosen to do, the Government have given councils no choice other than to find immediate savings, which will actually mean cuts in services and jobs.
We have heard a great deal today about Westminster, Kensington and Chelsea, and Hammersmith and Fulham, but as ever, the devil is in the detail. When we go beyond the headlines, we find that although those councils will lose more than £50 million in funding this year, savings for this year amount to only £5 million. We can only conclude either that the Secretary of State is so detached from the real world that he does not understand that, or that this is a deliberate tactical attempt to distract attention from the problems created by the Tory-led Government. In either event, councils and the communities that they serve deserve better.
James Morris
Is not one of the remarkable aspects of the settlement the fact that, in these difficult times, the Supporting People grant has been relatively protected by the Secretary of State? He has done precisely what I think the right hon. Lady wants to do, which is to ensure the protection of the most vulnerable. Should not the right hon. Lady be celebrating that?
Bob Blackman
My hon. Friend anticipates a matter that I was going to come to later. The outdated Barnett formula, which has transferred money to all parts of the country with no transparency whatsoever, must go and be replaced with a formula that delivers money on a fair and transparent basis that we can all see and understand. Even Lord Barnett himself cannot believe that his formula, which has existed for some 40 years, was not removed or transformed under 13 years of Labour Government, but they did not do it. That is one of the things that has to go.
We should deal with issues relating to the front-loading of reductions in expenditure. The reality is that the Government are having to deal with a deficit inherited from the Labour Government. We get maximum benefit from making public expenditure reductions early because we get four or five years-worth of reductions as a result. That is precisely the reason for doing it.
James Morris
As the right hon. Member for Don Valley (Caroline Flint) said, Labour was committed to reducing the structural deficit in four years, which implied that 20% cuts in public expenditure would have been applied to local government. However, we did not hear a single thing from the Opposition about what they would have cut.