Local Government Funding

Debate between Jim Cunningham and Tom Blenkinsop

Tuesday 11th March 2014 Westminster Hall

[Tom Blenkinsop (Middlesbrough South and East Cleveland) (Lab)]

Good afternoon, Ms Dorries; it is a pleasure to be under your chairmanship for this important discussion. I appreciate that local government financing is a complex topic and one that I cannot do justice to in this short debate, but I am grateful to have been given the opportunity to highlight the gross disparities that regions face in the financing of local government.

When looking purely at settlement funding, it may appear that the differences are fairly small, with all regions besides London seeing their local authority funding cut by approximately 40% between 2010-11 and 2015-16. However, when we look at actual revenue spending power, we see that there is extremely large inter-regional variation. Revenue spending power takes into account a range of other sources of funding to local authorities and gives a more real—in this instance—sense of the disparities between regions.

The House of Commons Library has undertaken fantastic research that highlights my point. It has calculated the cumulative percentage cut in revenue spending power faced by each region between 2010-11 and 2015-16. Regions with high levels of deprivation and need face massive reductions, while regions with significantly lower levels of deprivation and need face much smaller reductions. The north-east faces an 18% cut, London and the north-west a 17% cut, Yorkshire and Humber a 16% cut, the west midlands a 16% cut and the east midlands a 12% cut. However, although they still face cuts, the south-west and the east of England face relatively small cuts of 9% and 8% respectively and the south-east faces a 6.6% cut.

In 2014-15, the 10 most deprived local authorities in England will lose six times more than the 10 least deprived compared with 2010-11, so while more deprived areas such as Liverpool, Hackney, Blackpool and my native Middlesbrough lose most, the Prime Minister’s own local authority, West Oxfordshire—one of the wealthiest—is seeing its spending power increase, as are other wealthier council areas.

Our constituents probably do not think much about the intricacies of local government funding formulae, but the consequences of the unfairness are real, significantly affecting our constituents and local communities. Both unitary authorities in my constituency, Middlesbrough and Redcar and Cleveland, have faced significant challenges and are set to face even more owing to the cuts imposed on them by the Department for Communities and Local Government.

Under a budget recently proposed by the independent mayor of Middlesbrough, Ray Mallon, 300 jobs are set to be axed and the Clairville stadium, the registry office, the TAD centre and the Middlesbrough teaching and learning centre are set to close. Elsewhere, services will be reduced, with the opening hours of leisure centres, for example, being slashed. That is not to mention the significant cuts and job losses that have already occurred in Middlesbrough.

The situation in Redcar and Cleveland is similarly bleak, with the council forced to reduce front-line services such as youth services and to make compulsory redundancies, as so many jobs have been lost that there are very few people left who are willing to take voluntary redundancy or early retirement.

[Mr Jim Cunningham (Coventry South) (Lab)]

I had a meeting last week with the leaders of the seven districts that make up the west midlands. It is becoming abundantly clear that over the next two or three years, those authorities will no longer be able to provide even the minimum services required. The situation goes back about 25 years to when Nicholas Ridley said that the ideal local authority would meet only once a year to give out contracts.

The Government, particularly the Tories, think in generations, and when they come back into power, they pick up where they left off. More importantly, Coventry will lose 1,000 jobs over the next two or three years, and it will have to find some £50 million on top of the £20-odd million that it has already found. Children’s services will suffer as much as education. Coventry and the west midlands local authorities are in a real bind.

[Tom Blenkinsop]

The picture is similar in the north-east. For example, the leader of Newcastle city council, Councillor Nick Forbes, has talked about his fear that local authorities are fast approaching a cliff edge in terms of their ability to perform even statutory duties. I also received some interesting information from the Local Government Authority about other anomalies relating to capping, which I will come to later.

Redcar and Cleveland borough council should be applauded for protecting and supporting a local company, SSI UK—an employer of fundamental importance for Redcar, Cleveland and the surrounding Tees valley area. The firm invested heavily in Teesside Cast Products’ blast furnace, coke ovens, basic oxygen steelmaking plant and continuous casting plant.

I know the company well, having been a union official on its site. Until recently, it was unable to pay its business rates, which mounted up to some £19 million. If Redcar and Cleveland borough council had not taken on board that burden, it would have been difficult for the company to keep functioning. Fortunately, a settlement is now on the table, but if that settlement had not been achieved, the local authority would have had to cut a further £9 million on top of the cuts imposed on it, without any central Government assistance. We must praise the borough council for managing its already tight budget in difficult circumstances.

Locally, some Tories and Liberal Democrats have accused councillors of relishing and delighting in cutting front-line services, and have claimed that they are seeking to score partisan political points. That is clearly not the case. Councils are making cuts because the political settlement forced on them necessitates their doing so. If anything is partisan, it is central Government’s agenda and message, because Conservative areas generally receive much smaller cuts or even budget increases. I highlight the example of the Lord Chancellor’s local authority, Epsom and Ewell, which is receiving a 3.51% increase in non-ring-fenced central Government finance provision between 2011-12 and 2015-16. In the same period, Middlesbrough and Redcar and Cleveland face a cut of approximately 30%.

A similar accusation is often levelled at local authorities that decide that freezing council tax would leave them in an even more precarious medium to long-term financial situation. That is clearly motivated not by partisan factors but by the fear, common to many local authorities, that accepting such a freeze will leave a black hole in their finances in years to come.

[Mr Jim Cunningham]

Freezing council tax might sound like a good idea at the time, but the council tax payer will pay the price two or three years down the road. My hon. Friend must also remember that in addition to local authority cuts as we know them, cuts have been made to the fire service, to the police and to neighbourhood policing, even though the Government want to cut crime.

[Tom Blenkinsop]

I agree with my hon. Friend. There are other factors, which I will not be able to go into today, and local people often expect local authorities to pick up the slack. That slack has totally gone, however. We have gone beyond cutting into flesh, and we are now cutting into bone, as local authorities increasingly recognise. Tory-controlled local authorities feel that the Government are forcing them into a position where they have to increase council tax to secure their financial future. I believe 18 councils are in that situation. Indeed, the Prime Minister’s council, Oxfordshire county council, is proposing a 1.99% increase, as is the Foreign Secretary’s council, North Yorkshire county council, which is local to me.

We have to look across the piece. I will quote from an LGA briefing that highlights issues that the Minister must take on board. For example, the LGA says:

“Councils that have frozen their council tax could still face having to organise referendums, whether or not the increase in total council tax was a direct result of their financial decisions.”

The reason for that is:

“The extension of council tax referendums to include levying bodies risks perverse outcomes that will put growth generating investment at risk.”

That may affect things such as internal drainage boards, flood defence, integrated transport plans and pension authorities. We cannot discuss this in any depth today, but Government policy is increasingly to use the private sector rather than the state for people’s pensions. The LGA states:

“Pension authorities in some Metropolitan Counties and London operate the legacy pension schemes of the Greater London Council and former Metropolitan Counties. As with the rest of the Local Government Pension Scheme, there is little control over the costs of these which are increasing with each successive valuation.”

There will be consequences for pension policy, transport policy and floods policy.

Efficiency savings will go only so far to plug the funding black hole that central Government have imposed on local government. The scale of cuts faced by councils in the north-east has led some, such as Newcastle city council, to warn that in a few years’ time they will be unable to afford to perform all their statutory duties. I imagine that the Minister will tell us, as he and his colleagues have done many times, that the reason why local authorities in regions such as the north-east face larger cuts is that they receive more funding from central Government than do those in other regions.

That is a false argument for two reasons. First, those disparities exist not only in absolute figures but in percentage terms. Secondly, and crucially, regions such as the north-east receive more funding than those such as the south-east because their need is greater. If we were to take to its logical conclusion the Secretary of State’s argument that cutting in the north-east is fine because the region receives more to begin with, we would end up with total uniformity in per capita central Government funding to local government, irrespective of an area’s deprivation and need. Does the Minister agree that it is absurd to ignore or underweight deprivation in funding formulae, as his local government financing policies do?

I am conscious that the Minister may also say that the north-east and other deprived regions are receiving punitive cuts because of the need to rebalance the public and private sectors in those regions. Although there is a need further to develop the private sector and private sector employment in regions such as mine, does he agree that the lack of regional economic resilience is caused by long-standing structural issues that date back to the ’70s and ’80s, if not before, and that there is a real risk that disproportionate cuts to local government and the consequent job losses will reduce the aggregate demand in the region? Would that not hamper, rather than help, the development of the region’s private sector?

I realise that the problem is not purely a north-south divide; it is more complex than that, and many factors are involved. Issues such as rural deprivation affect parts of the north-east such as my constituency, while deprived areas of London are also being penalised. For example, the Government’s figures show that Lewisham, which is 31st on the index of multiple deprivation, will lose 9.6% of its spending power, or approximately £2.93 million, between 2013-14 and 2015-16. Its neighbour, Bromley, which is 203rd most deprived and Tory, will receive an extra £3.4 million over the same period.

Furthermore, there is considerable intra-regional variation. Deprived parts of the south, such as Southampton, fare much worse than areas such as Poole. That said, northern regions are more deprived, in general, than southern ones. As the Tory-led Government have made the political decision that deprived areas should face more cuts and a greater reduction in revenue spending power than well-off ones, northern local authorities are generally being hit much harder than southern ones. Currently, we do not have a one-nation system to determine how much funding local government should receive. We need a one-nation system of local government financing, in which need and deprivation are properly considered and in which local government is given the resources it requires to thrive and to help local businesses grow.