Local Government Finance

Justin Tomlinson Excerpts

Wednesday 8th February 2012 Commons Chamber

[Justin Tomlinson (North Swindon) (Con)]

I was not intending to speak in this debate, but many hon. Members have highlighted the importance of fairness, so I thought that someone should stand up and highlight the fairness to council tax payers. I speak from experience, having been a councillor for 10 years on Swindon borough council. We took control of that council off the back of a 42% hike in council tax in just three years. When my hon. Friend the Member for Mid Dorset and North Poole (Annette Brooke) talked about an average Labour council tax rise of just over 10%, I thought, “If only that had been the case!”

Members have highlighted their concerns about the council tax referendum, but I can assure them that the constituents whom I represented as a councillor and whom I now represent as an MP would have been delighted to have had the opportunity to hold the Labour administration to account. We must bear it in mind that those who suffered most at the hands of the council tax hikes were those on fixed incomes, including pensioners.

I want to talk about the opportunities to give local authorities greater freedom and enable them to address and protect the important front-line services that many Members have highlighted. For example, during my time as a councillor, Labour not only hiked council tax by 42% in three years, but managed to drive down standards until we were the joint worst in the country. The Government inspectors came in and said, “You need to reinvigorate the council. You need to ensure that you have an excellent top management team. You need to go out to market and get the very best council officers available. To do that, you must pay them considerably more money than they are paid now.” The council almost doubled the money on offer and re-employed pretty much the same officers—all paid for by local council tax payers. I welcome the fact, therefore, that the Government will be pulling back on the huge numbers of inspections.

I welcome developments, including in my constituency, where my chief executive is cutting his own pay for the second year in the row—we are seeing that across the country. We need greater transparency and accountability for the highest earners in the public sector.

We also saw a great disparity between the national pay settlements, where the Government would award pay rises for public sector workers, but then award the local authorities that process that money a much smaller local authority settlement. All local authorities were invariably playing catch-up before they had even started the cycle of working out the following year’s council tax.

We had endless BVP—best value performance—targets. When I first became the lead member for leisure, recreation and culture, I was particularly excited to bestow my unique “Tomlinson vision” of what I wanted to do. However, I was presented with a colourful chart setting out exactly what the Government insisted I should do as the lead member, which bore very little resemblance to the public’s priorities. All that cost considerable amounts of money, as we chased the national—and irrelevant—targets. There was also a need for endless consultations and vanity communications projects, where in some regions we had to go out and spend many thousands of pounds talking to just a handful of people to determine what we should and should not do.

We need greater transparency in how local authorities spend money, and I had an end-of-term Adjournment debate on that subject. This Government are trying to open up local government finance, so that we can embrace the potential armchair auditors—the hundreds and thousands of people out there who do not have the time to be full-time councillors, but who have good ideas or good experience of how local authorities could save money. I set out some of the challenges that local residents face in identifying financial figures and being able to make suggestions. I said that local authorities should embrace the idea, setting up their own star chambers, incentivising local residents to find savings and sharing those savings with local residents, so that the council can bank half the money. Perhaps the local residents could then suggest which front-line services the other half could be spent on improving. I would like to see a lot more of that. I was told that one of the arguments against that idea is that it would cost many local authorities a lot of money to answer such requests and understand whether local residents were right in challenging the figures. However, it is a worry if local authorities do not own their own budgets and are not able easily to answer such requests, because we would expect them to be able to do so.

A greater priority needs to be placed on capital investment in invest-to-save schemes. As the lead member for leisure, I knew that the majority of the things that we did would end up costing us revenue, which put further pressure on council tax, so we started to prioritise activities such as five-a-side football pitches. We built three 3G—third-generation—football pitches on a four-year payback scheme. They were paid off within 13 months, and then contributed money back into the council tax coffers, as well as providing a brand-new facility for local residents.

Members have already talked about the need for better procurement and shared services across borders. We were one of the first local authorities to combine the lead for adult social services with the primary care trust, so that there was one chief executive. Rather than having two competing organisations, they were working together. It saved costs and we had just one priority. Finally, the opportunities presented through the business rates scheme and the new homes bonus provide local authorities with an incentive, as they are rewarded for doing the right thing. I remember the number of times that businesses would come to us and say, “You should be doing far more to promote us,” but there was no financial incentive to do so; in fact, sometimes there was a disincentive. However, we now have a real opportunity.

Although these are challenging times, we must never forget that we are here to represent hard-pressed council tax payers. Despite the challenging figures that people have to find, there are plenty of opportunities to improve front-line services and protect the hard-pressed council tax payer.