Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Jon Trickett and Greg Clark

Tuesday 13th September 2016 Commons Chamber

[Greg Clark]

As I said earlier, we will make sure we work with our colleagues across the United Kingdom. I had a very productive meeting with Simon Hamilton in the summer, to make sure we co-ordinate our efforts with those of policy makers in Northern Ireland. It needs to be joined-up and it will be, and we will make sure our negotiating mandate reflects contributions from across the UK.

[Jon Trickett (Hemsworth) (Lab)]

I join others in welcoming those on the Front Bench and the creation of a Department that is going to deal with industrial strategy. The country is badly unbalanced at the moment and we will support any realistic thorough-going industrial strategy that is developed.

We know how the strategy has gone over the summer—BHS has gone bust, with 11.000 jobs gone. Sports Direct is paying less than the minimum wage, world-leading company ARM, a home-grown British gem, has been sold overseas—and meanwhile one of the Secretary of State’s Cabinet colleagues has talked down British business, calling our companies fat and lazy, and there is still no clear and unambiguous progress on the steel industry. It has been over two years since the consultation on the steel industry pensions ended. When will the right hon. Gentleman make it clear that the pensions of tens of thousands of loyal and hard-working steel workers will be properly protected?

[Greg Clark]

The steel industry is a very important industry in our country. As the hon. Gentleman knows, I grew up in Teesside where it was particularly prominent. I had some productive discussions in the summer, including visiting south Wales to make sure the Government can give the right support to a sustainable future for the steel industry, and I am happy to make the hon. Gentleman aware of these discussions.

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Jon Trickett and Greg Clark

Monday 6th June 2016 Commons Chamber

[Greg Clark]

Yes, it is important that we have specialist services. That is part of the discussions we are having with the charities through the drawing up of the national statement. We have secured more funding than has been available—three times as much funding—and that will be important. I think there is a wider point here, too, because there are connections between the public space and the domestic space. It is incumbent on all of us to maintain a public sphere in which women are safe from abuse, bullying and harassment, and that example should start from public life.

[Jon Trickett (Hemsworth) (Lab)]

I welcome what the Secretary of State has just said about the statement and about the additional money, but a recent Women’s Aid report stated:

“One major challenge facing specialist refuge provision is the awarding of tenders to large generic providers”.

The report also includes the shocking fact that one in six specialist refuges has closed since 2010, and it states that on one particular day, 103 children and 155 women across the country were turned away because a place was not available. What part does the Secretary of State feel the Government’s cuts may have played in this loss of services, and will he agree immediately to review the present procurement practices to ensure that the best possible quality of specialist refuges is available in every single community?

[Greg Clark]

The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right that there needs to be total confidence. Any person who suffers from domestic violence should be confident that they can have a place of safety. That is behind the statement of expectations that is being drawn up, and he will be pleased that that is continuing. He should know that the number of bed spaces in refuges has increased in the last two years, according to UK Refuges Online, but we need to make sure that that confidence is there. I am sure he will agree that true success is when women do not have to move from their homes because they have been the victims of violence by their partners. True success is when women can be confident in staying there, and when the perpetrators of such abuse have to leave.

Budget Resolutions and Economic Situation

Debate between Jon Trickett and Greg Clark

Monday 21st March 2016 Commons Chamber

[Jon Trickett]

I agree entirely with my hon. Friend’s point.

Let me make some progress on devolution. The average pot of money available to the metro mayors appears to be about £30 million a year, but that is dwarfed by the severity of the cuts that each of their councils has suffered. Top-down devolution, compounded by financial injustice, simply will not work as an enduring solution. Labour wants properly funded, real devolution, which would include, for example, the power for every council to open schools, build homes and regulate buses—mayor or no mayor.

That brings me to the Budget’s implications for the north of England. The Chancellor boasts about his northern powerhouse, but his Budget cuts to northern councils alone since 2010 add up to £3.9 billion being taken out of the northern economy. What do we get instead? A few million pounds for a scaled-down flood defence scheme in Leeds, and a few million more to fund not an electrified rail link, but a study that might report eventually on whether there should be electrification. None of that cuts the mustard—it is more of a power scam than a powerhouse.

Let me express my great admiration for councillors of all parties who do their very best across the nation, despite years of cuts, to protect services. Libraries, for example, are one of the most prized assets in any community, but they are frequently the first to go. On Friday, I visited Wyke library in Bradford. The council has managed to keep it open, despite the prospect of losing half its budget in a decade. The library is a beacon of hope and self-improvement, buzzing with learning. I met people there who were studying to better their lot in life. They told me there was no way on earth they could afford to buy the books they could borrow from a public library or to use the internet, which was also available. The priority had to be putting food on the table for their kids, but they were able to come to the library and have access to knowledge. I met one man who was using the internet—publicly provided in a public library—to complete his PhD. Cutting libraries, cutting museums, cutting theatres—all of this is nothing short of cultural vandalism.

The Secretary of State did a round of media interviews this morning. On ITN, he told Conservative Members to come together again; he said they should stop scrapping with each other. Well, good luck with that. Then he went on the “Today” programme and talked about the rough and tumble of Budget negotiations, as if that explained the resignation of the right hon. Member for Chingford and Woodford Green (Mr Duncan Smith).

I think the Secretary of State is a decent man, and I suspect that, in his heart of hearts, he appreciates the value of local government services. He knows the role—how could he not?—that many of them play in supporting the vulnerable, but what does he really know about the rough and tumble of Budget negotiations? He was the first Secretary of State to sign up on the Chancellor’s terms.

On the radio this morning, the Secretary of State referred to the right hon. Member for Chingford and Woodford Green as his very good friend. My guess is that he may not want to follow the path of his very good friend and resign from the Government to defend local councils. I hope, however, that he will decide to fight his corner rather more strongly than he has this year against a Chancellor who has proved his judgment is nil.

[Greg Clark]

I am grateful for this little riff on resignations, but coming from a party that resigned from reality last August, it is pretty rich.

[Jon Trickett]

I think the Secretary of State should have stayed in this seat rather than make that intervention.

It is time for the Secretary of State to stand up to the demands of an unreasonable Chancellor, rather than standing by while communities are decimated. If he will not, we will.

Local Government Finance

Debate between Jon Trickett and Greg Clark

Monday 8th February 2016 Commons Chamber

[Jon Trickett (Hemsworth) (Lab)]

I thank the Secretary of State for his courtesy in providing me with an advance copy of his statement. We welcome some of the announcements made this afternoon. It is clearly a good thing that more money is being provided to rural communities that are particularly hard hit, but will he explain exactly where the additional funding is coming from? It sounded like a sum of just over £200 million, but that obviously represents a massive shortfall in relation to the billions required to meet all the spending pressures. Nevertheless, where is this additional funding coming from? Has he had to cut other areas of local government expenditure to deliver the additional money? Above all, will he confirm that all this is purely transitional? It reminds me of someone speeding along the road into a disaster who then says he will take his foot off the accelerator without changing the destination. Local government is facing a disaster.

The Secretary of State’s provisional announcement the other week seems to have added some unusual recruits to Labour’s Anti Austerity Alliance. I wonder whether the right hon. Gentleman knows the identity of the anonymous Tory MP who told “ConservativeHome”, which is essential reading—[Interruption.] It certainly is true. This anonymous MP said:

“Councillors have done the right thing, and done it well, in saving vast amounts of money in the last few years. But now all the fat is gone, all the meat is gone and government wants to gnaw on the bone. I’m not having my local swimming pools and libraries closed down”—

and I say hear, hear to that! Is the Secretary of State really gnawing on the bone of local government, as many people feel—in his party and elsewhere? Does he acknowledge that, according to the Tory-controlled Local Government Association, even if every council in England increased council tax by the maximum allowed by the Government for the next four years and even if every penny of that increase went only on supporting the elderly, that would still leave a funding gap of over £1 billion on social care alone?

Only last March, the then Minister responsible for social care promised that the Government would end the infamous 15-minute flying visits. Is that still the Secretary of State’s policy, and if so, how will it be funded, given the £1 billion shortfall? When does the right hon. Gentleman envisage the Government achieving this target?

On how the Government distribute funding between councils, how does the right hon. Gentleman explain the manifest injustice that the most deprived areas have been cut the most? As things stand, the 10 most deprived areas in England will be 18 times worse off than the 10 least deprived areas. How will he explain to hard-pressed families that their services will be cut at the same time as he is engineering council tax increases—up to about 20%, we estimate, by the end of this Parliament?

It is clear from the Secretary of State’s statement that he has studied carefully the representations made by the Rural Services Network, as well as by some anonymous Tory MPs. Perhaps some of them were not anonymous. The Rural Services Network is also Conservative-led, and it said that his provisional statement would

“make life for hundreds of thousands of people across all areas of rural England totally insufferable.”

That is what the Tory rural network said. Can the right hon. Gentleman guarantee that the relatively small increase in the rural services delivery grant announced today will mean that no county councils will have to cut home helps or children’s homes or public transport? Is he really recommending to rural districts that they increase council tax by a precept of at least 2% or by £5—not by whichever is the lower, but by whichever is the higher? Does he acknowledge that more than £20 billion has been cut from local government since 2010? Is not the truth that during the Government’s first term, the impact of these cuts was felt primarily in the more urban northern and London boroughs, and is now spreading far and wide throughout the English countryside?

I represent 20 rural villages. There is no doubt that the provisional settlement was devastating for rural England—how could the Secretary of State make such an announcement? —and that the settlement he has announced today is far from adequate. Will he confirm, as it is transitional, that he intends all the cuts that he announced at the time of the provisional settlement to be imposed on rural areas in due course, during the present Parliament? When will he give the House details of any equalisation measures that he intends to introduce in relation to business rates?

Does the Secretary of State accept that all these cuts are, in essence, a political choice rather than an economic necessity? Should the Government not learn lessons from other members of the European Union that are raising hundreds of millions of pounds more than we are in tax from Google and other multinationals—money that could be used to support public services? Is it not time that the Chancellor showed some guts and stood up to the multinationals, rather than attacking the purses, and the services, of the poorest?

[Greg Clark]

I am delighted to hear about the hon. Gentleman’s reading material and to learn that it is through “ConservativeHome” that he seeks to educate himself these days. That makes a change from the red book that is the preferred choice of the shadow Chancellor. I encourage him to continue. He will know from looking at that very good website that there is constant praise for the efficiency of Conservative councils, which have a record of economy and good service for their residents.

As for increases in council tax, the hon. Gentleman will know all about that, because the Labour Government doubled council tax. According to projections from the Office for Budget Responsibility, at the end of this Parliament, it will be lower in real terms than it was at the beginning of the last Parliament, so we will take no lessons from the hon. Gentleman about council tax.

I detected a half-hearted welcome for the transitional funding, which is just as well, because some Labour council leaders called for precisely that, and I think they might have been disappointed if the hon. Gentleman had not supported them. He asked where the money would come from. I can confirm that it will not come from the local government financial settlement. We have been able to find resources outside the settlement, and, thanks to the generosity of the Chancellor, we are able to add them to it. I can also confirm that the social care precept was requested by local councils, which recognised, in a cross-party consensus, that as the population grows more elderly, there are more elderly people to be looked after in each council area. That is not a reflection on the efficiency or otherwise of councils; it is a demographic fact of life. It is right for us to provide for our elderly people in their retirement.

The hon. Gentleman mentions anonymous people and important figures in Conservative local government. My experience of my colleagues in every part of the House is that they are not anonymous, and they are not shrinking. They know that they can come and talk to me any time and that I will listen and respond when they make a good case. As for our leaders in local government, including the head of the Local Government Association, I could not help noticing the presence in the Chamber today of the gentleman concerned, and he seemed to have a happy smile on his face. I do not know whether that says anything to the hon. Gentleman.

Local Government Finance

Debate between Jon Trickett and Greg Clark

Thursday 17th December 2015 Commons Chamber

[Jon Trickett (Hemsworth) (Lab)]

I am grateful for advance notice of the statement. That is particularly welcome given that the Secretary of State’s predecessor rarely turned up in person on these occasions, and when he did it was often with a snarl, rather than with the Secretary of State’s customary smile.

Labour Members join the Secretary of State in rightly paying tribute to local councils and all their staff. The statement contains a number of details that look welcome, and we shall return to them in due course. Sadly, however, the central message is the same as always: cuts, cuts and more cuts.

The Secretary of State admits to a cash decrease of £200 million between now and 2019-20, but he forgets to say that the additional spending pressures amount to at least £6.3 billion, according to the Local Government Association. That is the scale of the cuts that will be inflicted on our communities by this settlement. What calculation has he made of the additional cost to local government caused by inflation? What about demographic change, which means that more elderly people need support than ever before? What about the additional statutory duties that he is giving to local government? How will all that be paid for?

This settlement massively reduces the central Government grant to local government. Does the Secretary of State agree with the House of Commons Library, which has calculated that even if the central Government grant was maintained at its current level throughout this Parliament, the Government would still run an overall surplus on the revenue account of more than £4 billion a year in 2019-2020? Is it not the truth that these cuts are a political choice made in No. 11, rather than an economic necessity?

Does the right hon. Gentleman agree with his Conservative colleague, Lord Porter, chair of the LGA, who said:

“It is wrong that the services our local communities rely on will face deeper cuts than the rest of the public sector yet again and for local taxpayers to be left to pick up the bill for new government policies without any additional funding. Even if councils stopped filling in potholes, maintaining parks, closed all children’s centres, libraries, museums, leisure centres and turned off every street light, they will not have saved enough money to plug the financial black hole they face by 2020.”?

The Government promised not to cut the budget for the NHS, but then they delegated public health functions to councils. Now they have cut that budget. Does the Secretary of State think that anyone is fooled when the Government act in such a way? Is it not a false economy to cut council funding for adult social care and public health? What is his estimate of the impact of those local government cuts on the NHS? Is it not obvious that if there is less care in the community and preventive health action by councils, there will inevitably be more pressure on more expensive acute provision within the NHS? Is that not the worst kind of Osbornomics? It is short-termist and tactical, rather than strategic and long term.

Does the Secretary of State accept that some of the councils facing the greatest needs in social care have the least ability to raise extra funds by levying the 2% precept? What about the northern powerhouse? Does he agree that cuts to northern local councils amount to tens of millions of pounds more than the relatively small sums that constitute the so-called powerhouse? No wonder the latest economic indicators show the north falling further behind.

The Minister mentioned council reserves, as if he thinks that councils are underspending on the revenue account and thereby building them up. What is his estimate of the quantity of the reserves earmarked by the Government for the Government’s specific objectives? What is his estimate of the amount of the reserves that are in schools’ accounts, and therefore inaccessible to councils? In any event, is it not the case that the reserves are often built up from asset sales and should not generally be used to prop up day-to-day spending?

The Secretary of State mentioned business rates. It is right that the money should be directed into town hall budgets—we welcome that—but the question he has failed to answer is this: how will business rates be distributed? Given that that income is notoriously uneven as between one council and another, how does he intend to make an equitable distribution of those funds? Does he accept the wise words of the Institute for Fiscal Studies:

“If you’re somewhere like Westminster, it’s easier to win from this system than if you’re somewhere like Wolverhampton”?

What estimate has he made of the distributional impact of the settlement on different councils? Does it maintain the trend of the past five years, when poorer urban councils lost out relative to more prosperous areas? Does some of his announcement not make the situation worse? The Joseph Rowntree Foundation has said that local authorities in deprived areas have seen cuts of £220 a head while more affluent areas have seen cuts of £40 a head.

Will the Secretary of State agree to look once more at the formula by which the Government distribute support to local government? He was not the author of the formula, but will he now re-examine the patent injustice in the way in which the money is distributed?

Finally, the country needs a new political and democratic settlement. A renaissance of democratic, relatively fiscally autonomous and locally accountable councils needs to be at the heart of a new settlement. The recent floods showed councils and their employees at their best. We welcome any additional funding to help with flooding, and we also welcome the multi-year funding that the right hon. Gentleman talked about—the Opposition proposed it in the Cities and Local Devolution Bill but the Government voted against it. Will he come back to the House with more details as soon as possible?

The Secretary of State pays lip service to local government renaissance, but does not the announcement, with top line cuts of billions of pounds invariably falling on the poorest areas, reveal that the Treasury’s heavy hand means that the Government are unlikely to deliver the renaissance that is so necessary for our country?

[Greg Clark]

In the spirit of Christmas, I will be charitable to the hon. Gentleman, who understandably wrote his response before hearing the statement. Far from its being a tactical settlement—that is how he put it—there could be nothing more strategic than a settlement that, for the first time ever, gives what local council leaders have long called for: the certainty of a four-year funding settlement, previously denied them, which gives them the chance to manage their affairs in exactly the way they want.

As the hon. Gentleman might have expected from our previous exchanges, during the past few months I have spent a lot of time with local government leaders, listening to them talk about the most important pressures on them and the most important concerns that they would like to see reflected. They communicated very clearly that funding adult social care was the major priority for all kinds of councils, and in this settlement we deliver the extra resources that we promised. The distribution among the authorities reflects that—something I would have thought he would give us credit for.

On the overall settlement, few authorities would even a few months ago have expected the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government to be able to announce, in effect, a flat cash settlement for local government for the whole of the spending review period.

The hon. Gentleman mentioned reserves. The fact is that local council reserves have increased over the past five years from £13 billion to more than £22.5 billion—a 71% increase. We do not assume in the settlement that local councils will make use of them, but they have the opportunity to do so because of the four-year settlement we have granted them.

The hon. Gentleman also mentioned the head of the LGA. I have met all the leading groups in the LGA, including his Labour colleagues. Because we are the biggest party in local government the hon. Gentleman suggests that the LGA is Conservative-controlled, but I have met local government leaders of all sorts. Lord Porter regards our discussions as fruitful and thinks that this is a fair financial settlement for all types of council and addresses the concerns they have put to me during the past few years.

Let me just refer to the expectations and the advice we received from those on the Labour Front Bench. When we had the financial statement last year, the previous shadow Secretary of State said that what councils needed was help with longer-term funding settlements so they could plan to protect services, and more devolution of power so they could work with other public services locally to get the most out of every pound of public funding, and that nowhere was that needed more than in social care. That is exactly what we deliver in this spending review settlement: prioritising social care, exactly what local government asked for; multi-year settlements, for which local government campaigned for many years; and the devolution of power to councils through the localisation of income, with councils responsible to electors and not to Whitehall.

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Jon Trickett and Greg Clark

Monday 9th November 2015 Commons Chamber

[Greg Clark]

The hon. Gentleman made similar cogent points in the Committee stage of the Cities and Local Government Devolution Bill, and the Under-Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, my hon. Friend the Member for Stockton South has committed to reflect on those remarks. It has been my experience, when taking Bills through this House, that we should accept the good sense of Members on both sides, and if we can improve the Bill by listening to them, we will certainly do so.

[Jon Trickett (Hemsworth) (Lab)]

The Secretary of State says that he wants devolution for Sheffield and democracy for the whole city region, but in order to secure that, he must first will the means. Unlike many other Secretaries of State, however, he has already capitulated, without a fight, to the Chancellor’s ideological zeal for cutting local government to the bone in Sheffield, Chesterfield and elsewhere. This is compounded by a funding formula that is rigged against areas of high deprivation. Is it not therefore the case that, despite all his fine words, he would allow the Treasury to strangle full-blown devolution in Sheffield and elsewhere at birth?

[Greg Clark]

The Chief Secretary to the Treasury has joined me on the Front Bench, and I do not think he looks like a strangler. He looks pretty benign to me. Sadly for the hon. Member for Hemsworth (Jon Trickett), he has got this wrong. The agreement that I reached with the Chief Secretary to the Treasury today related to my Department’s budget, not the budget for local authorities. In my view, it is right to lead from the front and to make significant savings in the running costs of my Department before I invite local councils to do the same.

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Jon Trickett and Greg Clark

Monday 14th September 2015 Commons Chamber

[Greg Clark]

It certainly is. I pay tribute to my hon. Friend and to his colleagues in Cornwall who were absolutely instrumental in securing that deal. I was delighted to travel down there with the Prime Minister to celebrate it, and indeed to do so over a pint of Tribute with him that very evening.

[Jon Trickett (Hemsworth) (Lab)]

The right hon. Gentleman mentioned Opposition Front Benchers. Let me say this: we are ready, willing and able to take the fight to Ministers and eventually to drive them out of office.

The country is far too centralised, and there is clearly, because politics is not working, a political imperative on all of us to seek proper devolution. Devolution tied to spending cuts simply does not work.

It is great that the Government heeded, belatedly, the call to allow some more refugees into our country—we welcome that. Local government and devolved local government came up to the mark straight away, with over 60 councils immediately coming forward. What discussions has the Secretary of State had with local councils about how to deal with this incredibly important matter? Will the Government now hold the national summit that we have been calling for?

[Greg Clark]

I welcome the shadow Secretary of State to his post. Members will recall that he was once Parliamentary Private Secretary to Peter Mandelson, and Tony Blair once said that his project would not be complete until Labour learned to love Peter Mandelson. I wonder whether the hon. Gentleman will update us on how that is progressing.

I welcome the hon. Gentleman’s support for devolution. I have found it possible to work on the most cordial terms with Labour authority leaders as well as Conservatives up and down the country, and I hope we will have a constructive working relationship.

The hon. Gentleman will know that the Home Secretary and I chaired a Cabinet Committee meeting on Syria at which the Local Government Association was represented. This morning I spoke to the head of the LGA and, indeed, the Labour leader of Blackpool Council, who told me that local government collectively was working very well with central Government to make sure that we deliver the commitment that has been given.

[Jon Trickett]

In terms of loving people, the Chancellor of the Exchequer has a long way to go to encourage people to love him.

When the Government indicated that funding would be made available to local councils to help refugees and resolve the refugee problems, it was clear that only a one-year financial deal was on offer. Will the Secretary of State guarantee that the Chancellor will provide enough money over the five years of this Parliament to help councils to deal with the crisis, because the current financial offer is simply inadequate?

[Greg Clark]

That is not the case. The one-year commitment is what is allowed under the official development assistance rules. The point of including our local government colleagues in the ministerial group designing the approach is to make sure that every aspect of the funding required is addressed. We will do that consensually with local government.