Justin Tomlinson
Main Page: Justin Tomlinson (Conservative - North Swindon)
Sheryll Murray (South East Cornwall) (Con)
Thank you, Mr Deputy Speaker, for allowing me to catch your eye in this important debate.
Having served as a local councillor for a number of years before coming to this place, I praise the Secretary of State for deciding to free local councils from the chains of red tape that stifled local government throughout the years of the Labour Administration. In the current economic climate, there is no doubt that there will be pain and that it will apply to local government as much as to any other area.
Last Friday, my local council in Cornwall adopted an emergency budget and took the early initiative to consider where savings might be made before the settlement announcement. It is predicted that the cost of delaying that decision would have been £55,000 a day. Sadly, opposition parties in Cornwall were promoting further meetings and the delaying of decisions. Ten days of delay would have cost £500,000 and twenty days of delay would have cost £1 million. Opposition parties seem to be engaging in delaying tactics just for the sake of it.
I ask the Secretary of State to note that, on the creation of the new unitary council, the authority inherited a significant number of reserves that were held for specific reasons. Most came with a variety of commitments against them and, as such, remained untouched last year, although there was a minor review through which some reserves were swept up corporately. A new strategy has been introduced, the main theme of which is to reduce radically the number of reserves that are held; to manage all capital reserves centrally as part of the corporate approach to capital financing; to create one budget equalisation reserve per directorate to allow minor budget variations to be funded without recourse to the corporate centre; and to ensure that the authority’s general reserve is sufficient.
The council acknowledges the need to consider alternative models of service delivery, including trusts, joint ventures and arm’s length management organisations, some of which involve services being delivered in partnership with the private sector.
Justin Tomlinson (North Swindon) (Con)
On the sharing of services and facilities, does my hon. Friend agree that we must work across service areas with neighbouring authorities and external organisations to deliver value for money and to drive up standards?
Sheryll Murray
Absolutely. I wholeheartedly agree with my hon. Friend.
The arm’s length companies will remain under the direct control of the council, but will free up trade with partners and trade outside our borders to bring more business into Cornwall. An example of that shared service is that back-office corporate support functions will be brought together in a single organisation alongside the council’s customer-facing front desk. That new organisation, although council controlled, will be able to sell its services to other partners within and outside Cornwall, generating more investment in our local economy. That will not only safeguard jobs in Cornwall but give the council a vehicle to create new employment opportunities: integrating those services will alone generate £2.7 million of savings.
Other ways of working include outsourcing, which is where organisational functions that could be delivered by in-house teams are contracted out to external organisations. The council has no intention of widespread outsourcing, but it will explore that option where it makes sense and delivers the best solution for local taxpayers.
Social enterprise is another likely model for service delivery, particularly in relation to the integration of health and social care services. Developing new models of service delivery is a radical shift, and the council has said that it will explore the details further in a series of business cases. It has said that it has a major role to play in decisions on how local health services will operate in future. It is keen to benefit from joint commissioning of care services and take the lead through its statutory role in health and well-being. Adult care services could be integrated into health services and new social enterprises, and public health services will become part of the council. The council will offer to provide a joined-up support service for GP consortiums, and there will be an integrated children’s service led by the council.
In Cornwall, the council has been talking about public sector reform for some time. It is resourceful and pragmatic, and it can deliver the big society.
George Hollingbery
My hon. Friend clearly demonstrates that there is no real excuse for local authorities pretending that we cannot do anything because we do not know how big the cuts will be. Straightforwardly, we know that there will be cuts, and we know that they will be serious.
There are any number of innovative third-sector partners out there doing a fantastic job. I would like to pick just one example from my local area—although it works out of the constituency of the Financial Secretary to the Treasury, my hon. Friend the Member for Fareham (Mr Hoban)—which is the You Trust. I recently met Nicola Youern, who runs the trust. The You Trust has a fantastic way of dealing with new cases, which Hampshire county council brings to it, of difficult-to-house young people. The trust first asks, “What can we teach you to do for yourself?” and then asks, “What can we teach your relatives and friends to do for you that will stop us having to intervene?” The trust goes through that sequence of trying to help people, before saying finally, “The only way we can deal with this is through a public sector intervention.” If there were more of that thinking across the public sector, we would get better results for less money.
I also welcome one or two changes that I think—I hope—will shortly appear in the localism Bill. The reporting changes are clearly very welcome. As the performance management portfolio holder for Winchester city council until recently, I was in charge of producing the statistics that we had to relay to central Government, almost none of which was used to create real change in the council but almost all of which were incredibly burdensome to collect.
Justin Tomlinson
Does my hon. Friend agree that the statistics rarely, if ever, matched what local residents said on the doorstep?
George Hollingbery
Indeed. My favourite was on the time taken to re-let a council house, whereby the better we did in re-letting a difficult-to-let council property the worse the statistic became, because of the longer average period for which we had not re-let the house. Every time we re-let a house that had been on the books for three years because it was in a poor condition, the worse our statistic became.
The work also involved a huge amount of management time. We had specialist employees dealing with just that issue and a specialist computer system just to monitor performance management, so I very much welcome rowing back the amount of information that local councils will have to report to central Government. I also became extraordinarily fed up with the number of strategies that we had to deal with, and I would very much welcome an assurance from the Minister that we will not have to do anything like as many of those, either.
I remember fondly the black and minority ethnic strategy for Winchester city council, an entirely necessary document.
Andrew Percy
I will give way in a moment to my train colleague; we sometimes catch the same train.
Lots of references have been made to going back to the 1980s, or to the 1970s and “Life on Mars”, but some of the contributions have been like listening to “The Twilight Zone”. In my 10 years serving as a councillor under the previous Labour Government, I seem to recall the picture not being quite as rosy as that painted by Labour Members. We have heard many comments about Conservative and Liberal councillors criticising this Government’s settlement, although we do not know what it is yet. In my 10 years on the council, Labour, Liberal and Conservative councillors tended to criticise the settlement coming forward from any Government. That is the way of local government, largely because the formulae are so complex that there is always something that one is not happy with in any settlement.
When I was a local councillor, our authority went through a number of assessments, first, through the corporate governance inspection regime, and later through the comprehensive performance assessment regime. Labour Members cannot possibly be defending the millions of pounds that went into those schemes. I will explain what those schemes did to a city council such as Hull, which at the beginning of the Labour Administration had some of the most deprived communities in the country, and still had them 13 years later. If hon. Members want to carry out a value-for-money analysis of that, I will leave it to them to do so. The decisions that we were forced to take as a result of going through the CGI process cost our city council millions of pounds over those 10 years.
The council, which was Labour-run, was judged to be a failing council. There was some fair criticism, no doubt, but I do not know whether we needed the expensive regime process that came in to tell us that the authority was not necessarily being run as it should be. One of the most appalling recommendations that followed the CGI process was that we should appoint five corporate directors, but they were not to be employed on the same salary as our previous service area directors—no, we were to employ five corporate directors on salaries of £105,000.
Justin Tomlinson
Like my hon. Friend, I served for 10 years as a councillor. I fully echo his point, given the number of times that we were encouraged, following inspections, to spend huge sums of money on members of staff just to prove that we were heading in the right direction.
Andrew Percy
I thank my hon. Friend for that intervention. This is not something that my council experienced on its own—it happened across the country, as we know.
As I said, we were expected to pay our corporate directors a salary of £105,000, which most people in the city of Hull, and indeed across east Yorkshire and northern Lincolnshire, can only dream of. Then, in time, we had to appoint a new chief executive. Needless to say, they were not appointed at the same salary as the previous chief executive—there was a massive salary increase that had a knock-on effect on other local authorities in our area, which judged themselves against how much the neighbouring authority was paying. If we cannot get people to work in local government on salaries lower than that of the Prime Minister, we are doing something badly wrong.
I also well remember the settlements that we used to get from the Labour Government—it was a case of giving with one hand and taking away with the other. Nowhere was that more clear than in the best value process, which required us to measure 100 to 200 different things and report back to central Government. One of our best value performance indicators was to measure how many of our park benches had arms. I am sorry, but when I go drinking in the Dog and Duck, or in my real pub, the Percy Arms—[Interruption.] It is conveniently named. People do not come up to me and say, “Andrew, what we want you to do as a local authority is to measure how many park benches have arms.” They want their council to be providing services—over the past couple of weeks, gritting, snow ploughing, and so on. They do not want it to be spending hundreds of thousands of pounds every year reporting back on such silly measures.
Andrew Percy
No, I will not, because the hon. Gentleman has had a lot to say today.
As the hon. Member for Barrow and Furness said, large rural authorities, as well as having considerable pockets of deprivation, face other challenges that are not taken into account. One of my two authorities is the largest unitary authority in the country. It is time that we looked at the structure of the grants system and made it take account of issues of rurality. For example, we know that rural poverty is hard to identify.
If the hon. Member for Scunthorpe (Nic Dakin) speaks, I am sure that he will talk more about our Labour local authority, which seems to take a different line on the spending cuts. I will allow others to conclude whether that is for political reasons, given that there are elections next year. However, my Conservative-run authority of East Riding has accepted that it will be tough. It has made decisions to prepare for that over the past two years, because it has known that it is coming. It knew what the Labour party was saying about 25% cuts—some of the biggest cuts in history—coming its way, so it started to make decisions accordingly. Even after the comprehensive spending review, one of my local councils said clearly:
“The programme involved a carefully planned reduction in expenditure in response to anticipated funding cuts.”
The council had been planning for the cuts already. Any half-decent leader of a local authority should have had that in mind, not least because they should have seen the previous Government’s plans. It is nonsense suddenly to pretend at this late juncture that it is all wicked and terrible, that nobody could have seen this coming, and that it would not have happened in the strange world that the Labour party currently seems to inhabit.
I have highlighted some of the waste and inefficiency that I saw as a local councillor. There are some very good people working in local authorities and providing services. The challenge for local authorities is to navel gaze, to look closely at what they are doing at the moment and to decide whether they can do that better. I give way one last time.
Justin Tomlinson
Does my hon. Friend agree that the decision to publish expenditure over £500 will allow a greater number of eyes to look over the information and identify much needed efficiency savings?
Andrew Percy
Of course I agree. That can be done relatively simply through programmes such as Oracle, which my former council spent millions of pounds investing in—perhaps investing should be in inverted commas.