Karin Smyth
Main Page: Karin Smyth (Labour - Bristol South)Department Debates - View all Karin Smyth's debates with the HM Treasury
(1 year, 7 months ago)
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Karin Smyth
The Minister said that local government has made appeals regarding social care implementation, which is obviously the responsibility of the Department of Health and Social Care. Has the Treasury made any assessment of the waste of money across local government since the Government made announcements about implementing the reforms and systems have been put in place? Has the Treasury considered who is going to deliver these magical packages of care without a workforce plan? In my extensive experience of delivering such projects, what will happen is that we will see tents in car parks again, new hotels being registered for spaces, and agency staff supporting the care packages on higher wages, thus costing the system more. We will be back here in six months’ time having not supported the workforce strategy, not properly recruited people and wasted more taxpayers’ money. What has the Treasury done in respect of the Department of Health and Social Care and local government about the efficiency of this particular measure?
John Glen
Let me take those points in turn. The hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon) made a point about nurses’ salaries and the cost of not having that workforce in place. That is exactly what this work will do: we will look at the gaps and respond to the pay demands in due course.
The hon. Member for Bristol South asked what the Treasury has done in terms of the money that has already been expended in looking at the changes; I cannot give her a precise figure but I would be happy to write to her. The Treasury is focused on working closely with Patricia Hewitt, the Department of Health and Social Care and NHS England to grip this issue in the fullest possible way, recognising the interaction between hospitals and social care, to ensure that we have the best possible solution to deal with the challenges we face.
Members will recognise that only by expanding the capacity of the social care system will we free up hospital beds, so we are making up to £2.8 billion of extra funding available to the adult social care system in England. That will increase to £4.7 billion in 2024-25. We of course need the NHS to continue to look at where it can squeeze more out of every pound—not at the expense of those on the frontline, but so that we can deliver ever-greater care—yet even with efficiency savings we will not have the NHS we all want without more money so, because of the difficult decisions taken elsewhere, we will increase the NHS budget in each of the next two years by an extra £3.3 billion. Taken together, our actions will ensure that up to £8 billion of additional funding is made available for health and social care in 2024-25.
The NHS and schools in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland face equivalent pressures, so the Barnett consequentials of today’s announcement will mean an extra £1.5 billion for the Scottish Government, £1.2 billion for the Welsh Government and £650 million for the Northern Ireland Executive. We make this investment not just because it is the right thing to do but as a central plank of our economic policy.
Similarly, as my right hon. Friend the Chancellor said, an investment in education is an investment in growth. The foundation of our success lies in the classroom just as much as it is found in the boardroom. I was very pleased to see representations from my parliamentary neighbour, my right hon. Friend the Member for North West Hampshire (Kit Malthouse), who made that point very clearly, as did a number of colleagues.
We are not just going to protect the education budget; we are going to increase it. The core schools budget will rise by £2.3 billion in both of the next two years—2023-24 and 2024-25—restoring 2010 levels of per pupil funding in real terms. Not only is that the right thing to do, but it makes economic sense: more opportunity will not only reap a fairer society, but deliver a more prosperous economy.
Just as we look to improve opportunities for those aged 16 and under, we are determined to help people already in work to raise their incomes, progress in work and become financially independent. That is why we have uprated working age and disability benefits in line with inflation, at a cost of £11 billion. It is also why we will ask more than 600,000 more people on universal credit to meet a work coach, so that they can get the support they need to increase their hours or earnings, and we will invest an extra £280 million to crack down on benefit fraud and error over the next two years.
Karin Smyth (Bristol South) (Lab)
We have had a lost decade, and now we have another lost decade in sight. It is particularly hard for young people starting out in the world of work: they have experienced a decline in school and FE funding and now they face low wages, a recession, high rents and a Government bereft of ideas and hope to encourage them into the future.
The stats are staggering. I have not heard any Conservative Member this afternoon address the stat that I find most astonishing, which is that the average family will be about £10,000 a year worse off than comparable families across the OECD. That is the reason for the normalisation of food banks, children going hungry at school and cramped housing, with no prospect of the things that bring joy to individuals and families—things like meals out, day trips or holidays, which also drive our local economies. It is now predicted that there will be a further 7% fall in household incomes over the next two years, coupled with the cost of the Government’s £4,000 family tax burden.
The Government have not chosen to help make us resilient at any time in the last 12 years. I know that we have had the pandemic and the war in Ukraine, of course, but all of this was apparent before then. They could have chosen to make different choices last week, but they chose not to. They chose to protect non-doms; they chose to give the banks a tax cut; they chose, proudly, to keep the VAT exemption on private schools; and crucially, they offered no plan for growth and no plan to deliver a more productive workforce, to build for prosperity and to help wealth creation.
I am one of the few Members of Parliament to have attended a further education college, and I have spoken about that over the years. It is staggering how, over the last 12 years, the Tories have consistently shown their disdain for skills and opportunity by not using this resource at the heart of our communities. In its 2021 annual report, the Institute for Fiscal Studies said:
“Further education colleges and sixth forms have seen the largest falls in per-pupil funding of any sector of the education system since 2010-11. Funding per student aged 16-18 in further education and sixth-form colleges fell by 14% in real terms between 2010-11 and 2019-20”.
It might be thought that the Government would want to help people back into the productive workforce, but adult education has been particularly badly hit. Again, the Institute for Fiscal Studies found that total spending on adult education and apprenticeships will be 25% lower in 2024-25 compared with 2010-11. Looking at classroom-based learning on its own, the IFS found that spending has plummeted by 50% over 10 years—and they wonder why we have a low-skills, unproductive workforce.
I once co-chaired the APPG on apprenticeships with the right hon. Member for Chichester (Gillian Keegan), who is now Secretary of State for Education. Every year, I brought together employers, Bristol City Council, apprenticeship providers and young people at an annual apprenticeship fair, and I will continue to do so. It is the best way to support young people into a productive career, and I still strongly believe in the ladder of opportunity, but significant issues remain unresolved on the levy and the wider supply chain to get people into the apprenticeships that are needed. The Government need to sort it out.
Nick Fletcher (Don Valley) (Con)
This Government have done a huge amount for apprenticeships. I should know, having been a businessman for the past 30 years and having employed more than 60 apprentices—I refer the House to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests—and much of that has been with the help of a Conservative Government who are putting a further £2.3 billion into education this year and next. It is fairly disingenuous to say what the hon. Member is saying.
Karin Smyth
I quoted the IFS and, if I had longer, I would quote more on what has happened to apprenticeships. I met Airbus recently, and several small businesses from my constituency, and I did not hear any of them say that it is working particularly well. We are not getting the promised benefit for small employers from the levy on large employers. We have gone backwards, and the numbers show how far backwards we have gone.
My hon. Friend the Member for Bristol East (Kerry McCarthy) asked the Under-Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, the hon. Member for North East Derbyshire (Lee Rowley), at oral questions whether he will visit Bristol to talk to our local council and better understand our budget shortfall and its impact. I am not sure whether the Minister accepted, but I back my hon. Friend’s invitation. Of course, Bristol City Council has considered efficiencies. Every council has, which is why Conservative council leaders are making the same plea as Labour council leaders.
Many of the issues faced by our communities are in the Government’s gift, including their decision to freeze local housing allowance rates. My constituent has a teenage son and daughter aged 12, so she is entitled to a three-bedroom property. She works but is on a low income, so she receives universal credit. She was paying £1,050 a month in rent, but her landlord increased it to £1,350 a month in January 2022. Local housing allowance means she can receive £950 a month for the housing element of universal credit. She was £100 a month short, but she is now £400 a month short. Even the cheapest alternative bedroomed property in Bristol South is around £1,300 a month. If landlords evict due to rent arrears, Bristol City Council has to house under the Housing Act 1996, but its budget for emergency housing is already £5 million overspent in this financial year. Emergency housing costs far more than ordinary properties, which are well beyond the LHA rates, so the additional cost is falling on the council. Last month, Bristol City Council spent over £1 million on interim housing. This is stressful and heartbreaking for families, and it is grossly inefficient. It is a really false economy.
Let me turn to care. The Government again ignored supporting young people and families. There was nothing on childcare, the cost of which in Bristol is now totally prohibitive. I am a former governor of one of Bristol’s nurseries. We have a long and proud history, and we still have 11 nurseries in the city, but they are under threat. Support is needed there to help people, and particularly women, back to work, and to help to educate young people in pre-school.
Finally, on social care, in 2015, 2017 and 2019, we saw Prime Ministers standing on the doorstep of No. 10 and making promises that they then broke. Councils have spent thousands of pounds preparing for the new changes from next October. Individuals and families were planning on the basis of changing to thresholds and the introduction of the cap. People are already at their wits’ end. The measures sneaked out last week really are a bitter blow. Why has it happened? It has happened for the same reason that this Government have let people in this country down over the last 12 years. There was no grip from the Department of Health and Social Care on this massive project and totally unrealistic financial resources to make it happen. The Department of Health does not just need to look at others for efficiency; it needs to look at itself. It has no idea how local government works or what the burden of the changes will be. We had funding for packages of care in the budget. Who on earth is going to deliver these packages of care? The workforce is short of 165,000 people. This is a short-term measure. It will not work and we will be back here next year, facing the same crisis in social care.