Social Care
Debate between Kelvin Hopkins and Baroness Keeley(6 years, 11 months ago)
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Barbara Keeley (Worsley and Eccles South) (Lab)
I beg to move,
That this House notes the Conservative Party’s manifesto commitment to a funding proposal for social care which would have no cap on care costs and would include the value of homes in the means test for care at home; further notes that this proposal would leave people with a maximum of only £100,000 of assets; calls on the Government to confirm its intention not to proceed with this commitment; and further calls on the Government to remove the threat to withdraw social care funding from, and stop fines on, local authorities for Delayed Transfers of Care and to commit to the extra funding needed to close the social care funding gap for 2017 and the remaining years of the 2017 Parliament.
After the debacle of the dementia tax, there has been continuing concern that the current and future issues about the funding of social care are not being addressed. The worries stirred up by the Conservative party during the general election will not be resolved without a better idea about what the future now holds for social care.
One place where people were expecting to hear some discussion on this was at the party conferences in September, but if we thought that we would hear about it in the conference speeches of the Secretaries of State responsible for social care, we were sadly let down.
At the Labour party conference, I talked about the crisis in social care and how it was failing those who need care and their families, failing unpaid family carers and failing hundreds of thousands of care workers. People needing care and their carers face the greatest impact. Since the Conservatives came to power in 2010, there are 400,000 fewer people receiving publicly funded care and, sadly, more than 1.2 million people now living with unmet care needs, many of whom are isolated and lonely.
Kelvin Hopkins (Luton North) (Lab)
My hon. Friend is raising a very important issue, which is leading to a lot of suffering among elderly people in particular. Will she make reference to the Royal Commission on Long Term Care for the Elderly, which, almost two decades ago, recommended free long-term care for all? That is where we should be.
Barbara Keeley
I will talk about how the Labour party will take forward proposals on the future of social care. We wait to hear what the Government choose to do. My hon. Friend is right that there is a driving need now.
The number of people—1.2 million—living with unmet care needs will inevitably rise without an injection of new funding. A lack of publicly funded care means that the task of meeting care needs falls more heavily on unpaid family carers. Many carers have to give up work because of the demands of caring, which has a real impact on their finances and future career prospects. The case for listening to carers and giving them more support is overwhelming. We were expecting a new carers’ strategy this spring, or, at the latest, in the summer. Some 6,500 carers had taken the time over and above their caring responsibilities to respond to the Government’s consultation. However, the Care Minister told me that the responses will merely be taken forward into a new consultation on social care.
Katy Styles, a carer and a campaigner for the Motor Neurone Disease Association, contributed to that consultation and hoped that her voice would be heard, alongside 6,500 other carers. She told me:
“Not publishing the National Carers Strategy has made me extremely angry. It sends a message that carers’ lives are unimportant. It sends a message that Government thinks we can carry on as we are. It sends a message that my own time is of little worth.”
That is a shabby way to treat carers—the people who provide more than 50% of the care in this country.
Barbara Keeley
We will come on to that. If the right hon. Gentleman wants to get into the mess that his party made, the truth is that we legislated a number of years ago to lift the asset floor to £118,000. What his party did during the election was drop that to £100,000. At the weekend, we learned that there was an intention to make it only £50,000. He should be clear about what his Front-Bench colleagues were trying to do. Since then, all we have heard is a deafening silence.
We need to focus on the crisis in social care now. We on the Labour Benches have raised many times just how fragile the care sector is after years of swingeing budget cuts by the Government. A survey by the Association of Directors of Adult Social Services reported that more than two thirds of councils had reported closures of care providers in the first five months of the financial year. Nearly half those councils had had homecare providers handing back contracts.
Kelvin Hopkins
My hon. Friend refers again to local authority care homes. In my constituency, three superb local authority care homes were forcibly closed effectively by Government policy. They were loved by the residents. They had full-time, permanently employed trade union staff and were supported and applauded by the local healthcare professionals. They were all closed. Now we have only the private sector, which is in crisis.
Barbara Keeley
It is very important that we bear in mind that the 1.45 million workforce in care will have been local government employees and will have enjoyed local government terms and conditions. We have talked many times about the fact that they are not now paid the minimum wage or travel time. They are very badly paid, with no pensions in prospect.
Barbara Keeley
I absolutely agree, and it was helpful of my hon. Friend to make that point. The sleep-ins issue has been a real cause of worry for many organisations over many months. It just goes to the heart of our assertion that people who work in care should be paid the minimum wage, including when they are working at night, which is what they are doing on sleep-ins. I have a constituent who looks after two households of people in adjoining properties, and she does not get normal sleep during the night as alarms can go off in any part of the properties. It is not right at all that those people were paid just fixed amounts, not the minimum wage. The Government must find the funding for that decision.
Kelvin Hopkins
I do apologise for intervening so often. Does my hon. Friend agree, as my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Erdington (Jack Dromey) has hinted, that the whole care sector ought to be in the public sector in the longer term at least, provided on the same basis—free at the point of need—as the national health service?
Barbara Keeley
As I said earlier, I will come to our proposals; I do not want to jump around in my speech too much more.
Going back to staff working in social care, it is important to remember and think about social workers, not just care staff. A recent study found that less than half the social workers surveyed felt that decisions about a person’s care and support were being left to their professional judgment; it is now all about budgets. More than a third said that they had felt unable to get people the care they need. Less than half felt supported to have necessary difficult conversations about changes to care with people needing care and their families.
The social care crisis is a direct result of the cuts that this Government have chosen to make. The King’s Fund, the Health Foundation and the Nuffield Trust estimated that there would be a funding gap in social care budgets of £1.9 billion for this year, but the extra funding in the Budget was only £1 billion, so there is still a funding gap of £900 million this year. Labour pledged an extra £1 billion for social care this year to start to deal with that funding crisis. However, the Government have chosen instead to put the pressure on local authorities and hard-pressed local council taxpayers to deal with that social crisis, which was made in Downing Street.
Delayed transfers of care due to social care cuts increased by more than a quarter in the 12 months to August this year, putting extra pressure on local councils. Now, sadly, Ministers are threatening councils with fines and further funding cuts to social care if targets for cutting delayed transfers of care cannot be met. Indeed, ADASS reported that half the social services directors it surveyed believe that their targets for delayed transfers were unrealistic. It is barely believable that the Government’s response to the social care crisis is to threaten to make the situation worse by cutting funding for social care even further. Some councils experiencing problems meeting targets were even summoned by NHS leaders last week to a meeting to review their performance challenges.
Many people have said that the approach of blaming and penalising local councils is not sustainable. The Conservative chair of the Local Government Association, Lord Porter, said of the warning letters sent from Ministers to councils:
“No council wants to see anyone stay in hospital for a day longer than necessary. These letters are hugely unhelpful at a time when local government and the NHS need to work together to tackle the health and social care crisis.”
The president of the ADASS, Margaret Willcox, has described the Government’s actions in threatening councils with further sanctions as, “frankly bizarre”. David Oliver, who is clinical vice-president of the Royal College of Physicians and a geriatric consultant, said about delayed transfers of care:
“Some of these delays are due to systematic cuts to social care budgets and provision. Others are due to a serious lack of capacity in community healthcare services…attempts to solve the problem through initiatives like the Better Care Fund or pressure from NHS England have failed”.
Interestingly, Andrea Sutcliffe, the chief inspector of social care at the Care Quality Commission, said:
“I worry that if people focus just on moving people through the system quickly then does that mean that they will force the discharge of somebody that is old and frail into a service which we have rated ‘inadequate’”.
We now have a Government who are driving the NHS to be obsessed with dealing with delayed transfers of care, seemingly above all else. This obsession causes further problems if patients are discharged without planning what they need outside hospital.
Age UK give an example that was brought to it:
“Terry’s father Richard, 85, is in hospital following a stroke. He is ready for discharge and has been assessed as needing rehabilitative care through two home visits a day. However he was then told that there are no reablement services available in his area. Terry has been told to ‘get his father out of hospital’ and to look for and fund the care himself.”
My own local hospital, Salford Royal, sadly seems to have similar issues. Last week, I spoke to a constituent who described her own discharge by saying, “I was thrown out of hospital.” Having had surgery for an infected bite that caused sepsis and a hand that she could not use, my constituent was given no discharge summary, no advice on how to manage her wound and no advice about her recovery. When she struggled to get dressed, she was told that she had to get out quickly, otherwise, “This will count as a failed discharge.” This a theme we may remember from last winter.
I remind the Minister that the British Red Cross talked then of a humanitarian crisis whereby people were sent home without clothes or into chaotic situations. Those chaotic situations involved them falling and not being found for hours, or not being washed because there were no care staff to help them. Ordering patients out of hospital when there is no reablement service for them, without advice about wounds or recovery, or to a care facility rated as inadequate just to meet unrealistic targets on delayed discharge is a recipe for an even worse crisis this winter.
European Union (Finance) Bill
Debate between Kelvin Hopkins and Baroness Keeley(9 years, 3 months ago)
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Kelvin Hopkins
I rise to assure my hon. Friend that I am supporting her very strongly today.
Barbara Keeley
I think the hon. Gentleman will see when we come to the vote that we do have support.
Our new clause 3 would also improve accountability and transparency by inviting EU budget representatives to appear before the European Scrutiny Committees in this House and the other place each year before the EU budgets are negotiated. I appreciate the points made by Conservative Members that of course there should be no interference with the work of the European Scrutiny Committee in this House, but what we have tried to do in these new clauses is send the strongest statement we can send and give the strongest possible support to all those in this House who want to see these important aspects of value for money and budgetary control put in place.
Kelvin Hopkins
My hon. Friend is making a fair point. It has been suggested that, in real terms, we should be paying 7% less into the European Union budget by—I think—2020. Given what she has just said, is it not likely that that will not turn out to be true, and we will not see a reduction of that kind?
Barbara Keeley
Indeed, that is a very real fear. If we look down the list of commitments and compare it with the payments made, we will see the level of commitments that are still to roll forward, which is a very frightening prospect. I go back to the point that I have just made. This is a system designed to drive up budgets. We support what has taken place and recognise that the House voted for it back in 2012, but unless this system changes we will be in a situation in which commitments are being made in the period up to 2020 of €960 billion, which is €52 billion more. It is a serious matter. Clearly, it is serious if the Commission is taking on budgets and then not paying bills, but it is the upward pressure on the budget process that is the great concern.
In our last debate on this Bill, the hon. Members for Corby (Tom Pursglove), for North East Somerset (Mr Rees-Mogg), and for Daventry (Chris Heaton-Harris) and my hon. Friend the Member for Luton North (Kelvin Hopkins) referred to a range of concerns that their constituents had about EU finance, how the EU budget is spent and the need for control of the budget. That is a point to which we will keep returning.
In the debate of 15 January 2008 on the Committee stage of the European Communities (Finance) Bill—I have already mentioned this—the Financial Secretary, then shadow Treasury Minister, and his shadow Treasury colleagues called for a report on “all aspects of EU spending”. Clearly, both the Opposition then and the current Opposition have had concerns about this. The Minister and his colleagues called for that report in 2008. I hope that we still have time in the rest of this debate for him to repent his view that we do not need further reviews.
As I have mentioned, there were complications in the wording of the amendment in 2008. I have read through the debate. The difficulty that the hon. Gentleman and his hon. Friends on the shadow Treasury team at that time ran into was that the amendment called for Treasury certification that it
“considers the outcome of the review is satisfactory to the interests of the United Kingdom”.
That seemed to be the sticking point. We have avoided such complications in this Bill by tabling simpler amendments that ask for an analysis of the basis used for appropriations and the study of alternative arrangements.
The Minister has said that such a review is ongoing. Will he tell me at this point when we will see that review?
Barbara Keeley
I am not making that point in particular. What we are asking for in this clause is a review of budget priorities. We can see from the percentages that competitiveness for jobs and growth is the most important. I am not making specific points about specific countries. Under the new method of agricultural spending, I think that there is a great deal of flexibility for allocating the funding between countries.
Kelvin Hopkins
My hon. Friend made a very strong point about the CAP. If there were no CAP, would it not be sensible for us to subsidise sections of our own agriculture according to what we think is right rather than what the European Union thinks is right?
European Union (Finance) Bill
Debate between Kelvin Hopkins and Baroness Keeley(9 years, 3 months ago)
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Barbara Keeley
I think people do understand that. The point is that the benefits are not understood. [Interruption.] The right hon. Gentleman has his view, and other people have a different one. The process could be made clearer, and it is my contention that we will have to do that. As we put this important decision in front of people in the coming months, they will have to be able to understand this better than they do at the moment.
Interestingly, the European Commission recently sent hon. Members a document promising to tell us “How the European Union works”. We have a host of new Members with us today, and I do not know whether any of them have seen that document in among the mountain of material that has landed on them recently. It is a 40-page document, but it contains only two short paragraphs—indeed, 10 lines—about the EU budget. It does not give figures for that budget, nor does it describe how the money is spent. Yet in the months ahead, as I said, that will be a key aspect of the debate for the people of this country.
The debate in the House in February 2013 and other debates since have focused on the fact that substantial reform of priorities is still needed in the EU budget. We have had questions about the balance of agriculture spending, but the Labour party believes that growth and jobs should continue to be prioritised by cutting back even further on agriculture spending and other similar priorities. Spending on the common agricultural policy fell as a proportion of the budget from 55% in 1997 to 46% in 2010. We welcome the continued decline in agriculture spending as a share of the European budget; it will drop from 41% of EU commitments in 2014 to 35% in 2020. The difficult reflection for people outside Parliament, however, is that with agriculture making up only 1.6% of the total output of the European Union, why does it still account for 30% to 40% of the budget? There is still much more to do.
Kelvin Hopkins
I welcome what my hon. Friend is saying, but although the proportion of the budget commanded by agriculture is falling, in money terms over the past eight years there has been a fairly significant increase of 26%—so agriculture is still increasing in money terms.
Barbara Keeley
Indeed, and that is why I am making the point, with which I am sure my hon. Friend would agree, that if we want more of a focus on growth and jobs in a smaller budget, which we do in the Opposition, there have to be further cuts and changes in priorities.
In the debate on the settlement in February 2013, the modest increase in funds targeted towards growth, infrastructure, research and development, and innovation was welcomed, but we also expressed concern that the balance away from agriculture spending towards the spending on growth and jobs was not sufficient. We need constantly to remind ourselves about unemployment —24 million people are unemployed throughout the EU, including 4.8 million 15 to 24-year-olds. In the UK, of course, we still have 735,000 16 to 24-year-olds who are looking for work. We want to see greatly increased investment in the funds targeted on growth, infrastructure, research and development, and innovation. We need the European Union to provide a better framework and strategy to achieve the growth in jobs. Our missions go further than that, however, and we also need the EU to act as a guardian of rights and protections at work. The Opposition want to talk about creating jobs and to focus on the right type of jobs and on the quality and security of those jobs.
We have supported a cut in the EU budget, but we will continue to press for a reform of budget priorities. During the passage of the Bill, therefore, we will call for a fundamental review by the end of 2015 of the budget priorities and of waste and inefficiency in the EU budget. Debates in the House have included many references to outdated practices such as relocating the European Parliament to Strasbourg each month, which costs €200 million a year. There are a number of other areas where savings can be made.
In previous debates, hon. Members from both sides of the House have suggested many ways in which money could be saved and inefficiencies prevented in the European Union, ranging from cutting spending on the House of European History Museum, costing a reported £137 million, to cutting export refunds. Hon. Members repeatedly raised the need to reform the CAP—today is no exception—and a number have also mentioned the levels of salaries and benefits for EU staff, including their differential tax rate and housing allowances.
Kelvin Hopkins
Indeed. The hon. Gentleman is right. I have the Library note. The only time we had a net receipt from the European Union, or Common Market as it was then, was in 1975.
The major problem for us has been the common agricultural policy, which has been the major drain on the EU budget and to Britain’s enormous disadvantage over that time. Mrs Thatcher’s negotiation of a rebate was based on the fact that our agriculture was very different from that of most of the rest of the European Union and we were substantial net contributors, which was seen to be unfair so we secured a rebate. That rebate is no longer as large as it should be. Nevertheless, we did secure a rebate, which arose because of the CAP.
The Prime Minister would do well to seek Britain’s withdrawal from the CAP in his negotiations. That is certainly one of my red lines in the negotiations. The common agricultural policy is not a good thing for anyone, and certainly not for Britain. Last year I went with the European Scrutiny Committee to Lithuania. Lithuania used to be self-sufficient in food. Now it is being paid not to grow things. Large swathes of the land of Lithuania are being left fallow because the farmers are being paid not to grow things under the CAP, which is nonsense.
If we were outside the CAP we could continue to subsidise our own agriculture at the same level as occurs now, saving vast sums of money for the Exchequer while subsidising our farmers at the same level; or, more sensibly, we could decide how and where we subsidise more precisely, according to our own needs and what is better for Britain. We might want to preserve Welsh hill farms which may not be so efficient but are part of our culture and our environment and it is nice to keep them going, but we would not necessarily want to give such large subsidies to very large grain farmers in East Anglia, and so on. We could target the subsidies more sensibly, according to what we in this Chamber think, rather than what is decided in Brussels.
We should also be free to buy agricultural products on world markets and not have to pay EU duties on such imports. The EU still subsidises the dumping of sugar surpluses on world markets, a nonsense which discriminates against developing and poorer countries that produce sugar. There are many nonsenses in the EU budget and, as was pointed out earlier, it has failed to be signed off by the EU auditors for more than a decade and a half—a scandal. No business could operate having been refused audit approval for 15 or 20 years. It would be illegal to do so, I suspect. I want to see the EU budget substantially reformed.
Barbara Keeley
My hon. Friend is making an excellent speech. Does he wish to comment on the sheer difficulty of bringing about reform? In the October 2012 debate the then Financial Secretary to the Treasury, now the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, the right hon. Member for Tunbridge Wells (Greg Clark), said that the British Government had asked the Commission to model cuts of €5 billion, €10 billion and €15 billion in staffing costs. I know that my hon. Friend took part in the debate, but it is worth looking at the Commission’s response to our Government when they asked for that work to be done:
“We declined as it’s a lot of work and a waste of time for our staff who are busy with more urgent matters…we are better educated than national civil servants. We’re high fliers, not burger flippers”.—[Official Report, 31 October 2012; Vol. 552, c. 297.]
If that is the response that we get, is it not time that we took a more robust approach?
Kelvin Hopkins
I agree very strongly with my hon. Friend, who anticipates my next point: you do not go into a negotiation with the other side knowing that you will give way in the end; you go in making them think that if they do not give you something, you will walk away. Before entering this House, I spent many years working as a researcher in the trade union movement. Trade union negotiators do not go in quietly giving way to the employers. They start off with a tough stance and try to get something real out of those negotiations. We should be doing the same.
The new hon. Member for Uxbridge and South Ruislip (Boris Johnson), currently the Mayor of London, has made the point that we should be prepared to say to the other side in these negotiations that if we do not get a satisfactory conclusion, we would not be resistant to the idea of leaving the EU. A strong negotiating stance is necessary to win anything at all. I think that should be our position. I have a number of other red lines, which it would be inappropriate to go through in this debate, but the budget and the many irrationalities and nonsenses within it, primarily the common agricultural policy, should be addressed in the negotiations.
Localism Bill
Debate between Kelvin Hopkins and Baroness Keeley
Barbara Keeley
That is a contradiction. In fact, the 126 or 142 new powers—we can count them in different ways—are of great concern.
The list of legislation that we propose in amendment 37 for protection from those new powers may not be perfect—I am sure people can find fault with it—but it is vital to get a clear steer from Ministers that they do not intend to continue to see important council duties as burdens. Does the Secretary of State agree that the Homelessness Act 2002, which is on our proposed list, creates a vital duty for councils to have a strategy for tackling homelessness, or does he agree with Hammersmith and Fulham council, which has asked for that duty to be scrapped? Hammersmith and Fulham also wants to scrap the rough sleeper strategy, and wants not to assess the sufficiency of locally available child care. It wants no requirements on its youth service. Do Ministers believe that Hammersmith and Fulham should be able to shed those duties? That is the key question.
Councils such as Hammersmith and Fulham want to shake off what they view as burdensome duties, but the Opposition’s view is that those council services are vital and should be protected. A list of what is vital and to be protected is the key to that. In Committee, the Minister said:
“Every local authority will retain duties enshrined in other legislation to provide services and not to charge for them, if charging is not allowed at present.”––[Official Report, Localism Public Bill Committee, 1 February 2011; c. 184.]
However, Hammersmith and Fulham wants not to have plans for homeless people, and Wandsworth council plans to charge children £2.50 to use a playground. That is where we are. It is time for Ministers to end the uncertainty that they have generated with their sloppy plans for revising legislation on council duties. It is time for them to reintroduce certainty, so that people know that councils must provide land for allotments and an efficient library service, assess carers’ needs, and have plans for tackling homelessness.
I welcome the Minister’s partial sympathy on proposed new clauses 27 and 28 and the proposed amendments on pay transparency and very much look forward to developments. Much has been said in recent months on top pay in local government. I am sure that Ministers would agree that a great deal of that talk has been stoked by the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government. However, he has tended not to show the same concern for the lowest paid staff, or for levels of pay among consultants and contractors, who provide £38 billion-worth of goods and services to local government, which is paid for out of the public purse.
Our proposals aim to introduce pay transparency much more fully than the Government plan. We want to shine a light on top pay and low pay, and I welcome the Minister’s sympathy for that. However, the Opposition also want to develop the recommendations in the Hutton review on pay. Ministers said that they would reflect on that review, and I hope they take that seriously. All hon. Members agree that there has been some excessive growth in senior roles in the public sector, but there are also myths about public sector pay. The Local Government Association estimates that of 1.7 million employees in mainstream local government jobs, 60% earn less than £18,000 a year. According to the LGA, more than 400,000 council workers earn less than the living wage, including more than 250,000 who earn less than £6.50 an hour.
Kelvin Hopkins (Luton North) (Lab)
My hon. Friend makes a strong point. As a former Unison trade union officer, I know that a high proportion of those low-paid workers—a big majority—are women.
Barbara Keeley
Indeed, a quarter of those who experience in-work poverty are employed by the public sector. In addition, the average public sector pension, at £4,200, is very far from the gold-plated pension that people talk about. Our proposals would introduce greater transparency and help the objective of curbing excessive pay at the top of the scale, because it will be harder for a highly paid council chief executive to defend his or her pay if the public can see what that council pays its lowest-paid members of staff.
The Opposition believe that as well as an approach on top and low pay, we need a fair and consistent approach to transparency in local authority pay. As my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Erdington (Jack Dromey) said in Committee, Will Hutton’s report puts paid to the myths. Public sector employees earn only £1 of every £100 earned by the top 1%, or to put it another way, out of every £100 that is earned by the top 1%, only £1 is earned in the public sector. Therefore, the perception that the public sector is awash with fat cats is a myth, and it does not help when DCLG Ministers spend their time building that myth as a way of dealing with top pay.
The Hutton report confirms that increases in executive pay have been a private sector phenomenon. That is why tackling excess pay should happen not just in the public sector. We should also focus on pay in the private sector when money is paid from the public purse—that is the test. Staff on outsourced local government contracts tend to be concentrated in low-wage sectors such as cleaning, catering, low-skilled manual work and care work. One key question for hon. Members is this: do we want cleaners, care workers and teaching assistants to earn a living wage? The Opposition believe that they should earn such a wage. We therefore hope that Ministers and Government Members agree that the implementation of a senior pay policy in local government would be a double standard if the same logic is not applied to contractors, not least because the local government procurement market is valued at £38 billion.
Will Hutton said in his report that
“it is important that the Fair Pay Code and as far as possible the other recommendations of this Review are extended into the public services industry.”
I hope that Ministers—I welcome the Secretary of State to the Chamber—support Hutton’s proposals to extend pay transparency to those private sector contractors who are paid out of the public purse. Implementation of our proposals would help to ensure that executive pay does not spiral up, that low pay is challenged, and that people can be confident that their local council is spending their money fairly and wisely.
Finally, I support amendments 39 to 41, which are in my name and those of my hon. Friends the Members for Plymouth, Moor View (Alison Seabeck) and for Birmingham, Erdington. The proposals would remove the power of the Secretary of State, who has just joined us in the Chamber, to direct or order the imposition of shadow mayors. That is one of the most controversial measures in the Bill, and it represents the Government at their most centralising. The Government want to order a local authority to cease its existing form of governance and begin to operate a mayor and cabinet executive. Ministers spent months denying that they intended to try to impose shadow mayors.
I remind the Secretary of State that he gave the following answer to my hon. Friend the Member for Kingston upon Hull North (Diana Johnson) on 21 October 2010:
“She seems to be suggesting that we would somehow impose mayors on those 12 cities, but of course we will not-that is completely out of the question. The proposals will be subject to referendums. Once we know the views of the people in those 12 cities, we will move on to the election of a mayor if people vote for that.”—[Official Report, 21 October 2010; Vol. 516, c. 1117.]
[Interruption.] I am getting some confusing signals from Government Members. On the same day, to be clear about the Secretary of State’s intentions, my hon. Friend the Member for North Tyneside (Mrs Glindon) asked him again whether it was his intention to turn council leaders into mayors before holding a referendum. He stood at the Dispatch Box and referred my hon. Friend back to the earlier question:
“I ruled out the possibility that we would be imposing mayors. This will be subject to a referendum.”—[Official Report, 21 October 2010; Vol. 516, c. 1125.]
He was absolutely clear. However, the proposal in the Bill directly contradicts what the Secretary of State said on that occasion and on other occasions. It is further proof of a Government who say one thing and do another, and it raises further questions about whether what they say can be trusted at all.
Since the debate began on the proposal to impose mayors on 12 of our largest cities, opposition has bubbled up and developed all over the place. Indeed, the day after the Localism Bill was announced, the leader of Bradford council, Councillor Ian Greenwood, told the Bradford Telegraph and Argus newspaper that he was uncomfortable with being given an office to which he had not been elected. In that article, he said:
“My view is this is not the right thing for Bradford… I am uncomfortable about being given an office I wasn’t elected to. I don’t feel it’s the right thing to do. Leadership is not about dictating, it’s about taking people with you”.