Draft Local Government (Structural and Boundary Changes) (Supplementary Provisions and Miscellaneous Amendments) Order 2019

Jim McMahon Excerpts

Wednesday 13th February 2019 General Committees

[Jim McMahon (Oldham West and Royton) (Lab/Co-op)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Davies, in these wonderful morning Delegated Legislation Committees.

The order has been a long time in the making and we are towards the back end of the process, so there is no point spending the morning going through its history, but I have some questions to ask of the Minister. First of all, I welcome a principle and a culture that is not about changing the identity of a people and a place, but is instead about administration in an area. I just hope that when the changes have been made and the new authorities are fully functioning, that culture is followed through in everything the authorities do. We cannot believe that administrative boundaries are anything like the historical, trusted, valuable identities that people feel.

Let us be honest: there have been a number of Delegated Legislation Committees considering reorganisation in shire areas, and the reason why councils in those areas are considering reorganisation is their financial foundation. They are struggling to meet the increasing demand for adult social care and children’s services; their budgets are being hit year on year, in the same way as every local authority in England. They are increasing council tax, often to the maximum, but that is still not enough to replace the grant that the Government have taken away. The Government have refused to meet the social care, children’s services and homelessness demands that the Local Government Association has highlighted, and I am afraid that unless we deal with the crux of the issue, which is that £8 billion funding gap, reorganisation will not fix the problem. It will save some money, but it will not save the important neighbourhood services that make places what they are.

We cannot have a situation in England, which will be the outlier in the UK, in which councils are in effect just providers of social care and almost nothing else matters. That is not why councils come into existence or why councillors stand for election. People stand for election as councillors because they believe passionately in the power of their place and their communities. The idea that we should starve them of the resource they need to make those places better is, I am afraid, simply not in the spirit of a thriving Britain. As we approach Brexit—who knows when that will be—that demand for a better Britain has not been laid out and the offer has not been made to the people of this country. I strongly believe that local government is a foundation on which we will build a stronger country, but that cannot be done when we starve it of essential resources.

Obviously, we are embarking on the fair funding review, which will seek to address some of these issues. We know that the Government are keen for rural service unit costs to be taken into account, and Labour welcomes that, although we have repeatedly observed that the removal of deprivation as a factor in a number of service areas is not in the spirit of a fair funding review. A genuine review of council funding that takes into account all funding pressures must take both rural service unit costs and deprivation into account. Some services will be more expensive in rural areas; some will be more expensive in urban areas; and for many services, whether the area is rural or urban will have no bearing on cost.

In this reorganisation, for example, one of the biggest pressures is adult social care and children’s services, yet in the Government’s 2014 review of unit costs adult social care was not found to be more expensive in rural areas. It is assumed that the geography requires more downtime, with staff travelling from one appointment to the next, but when costs such as staffing and fewer children’s placements are taken into account, it is cheaper to deliver social care in rural than in urban areas. Given that is the lion’s share of the budget pressure for those local authorities, it prompts the question whether a fair funding review will fix the foundations of funding in this area. I press that point: what is the Government’s vision for fair funding? How do they intend to address the weak foundations that this reorganisation is being built on?

There are also the practicalities that are not often debated in this place but are really important. When many local authorities are brought together, they inherit different cultures, ways of working and staffing structures, which will of course change. They will also inherit different ways of collecting data, with different systems, programs and ways of recording jobs for a range of services. It would be comforting to hear that the Government have considered those points in the reorganisation, to ensure that, in the transition of many different data programs retained by councils, essential information is not lost.

Data and information technology have moved on but can be a significant bugbear. When I was council leader in Oldham, I often got the blame for the 1974 reorganisation; I had to point out that I was not born then but it was still a bugbear. When the councils reorganised, many district councils destroyed a lot of social care records as part of the transition, as district town halls closed to form the new metropolitan borough.

We need to ensure that, in the transition to a new authority, those practical matters are taken into account and that there is proper funding in place to ensure that it can be done efficiently.