Rural Upper-tier Local Authorities
Debate between Lewis Cocking and Noah Law(3 days, 15 hours ago)
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Lewis Cocking (Broxbourne) (Con)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mrs Barker, and I welcome the Minister back to his place. I commend the hon. Member for North Shropshire (Helen Morgan) for securing this important debate and giving us the opportunity to speak about the rural areas that this Labour Government are neglecting.
My constituency is home to a handful of farms and the beautiful Lee Valley regional park. Although it might not be the most rural, I am well aware of the pressures faced by rural communities, which have been made clear by hon. Members across the Chamber today. Having started off with the infamous family farm tax, the Government are now moving on to implement the unfair funding review. This change in the funding formula for local government seems to have been designed with the express purpose of stripping away funding from rural areas just to hand it to urban ones.
Lewis Cocking
Lots of difficult decisions had to be made. I politely say to the hon. Gentleman that his party is in government now. We will see the mettle that they are made of in the coming months, when they have to make difficult decisions to produce their Budget, and we will also see how that goes down with the British people outside this place.
Many rural councils face real challenges across the board, and now they are expected to cope with even fewer resources. In my area of Hertfordshire, a semi-rural local authority, the county council is facing a reduction in funding of around £50 million a year. That is thanks to this Labour Government, despite the council already being under extreme pressure from an unfavourable SEND funding formula. Under that formula, Hertfordshire receives one of the lowest funding allocations per head. It would receive millions more if it were funded at the same rate as other areas.
When it comes to SEND, rural authorities lose out. Inner London boroughs receive thousands of pounds more in high needs block funding per pupil. For example, a child in Camden is allocated four times as much as a child in Yorkshire. It should not matter where someone is born in the country; children with special educational needs deserve the same resources. I am sure that all hon. Members from right across this House can agree with that.
Similarly, rural authorities have been ignored throughout this Government’s top-down local government reorganisation. As we have seen in Leicestershire, Nottinghamshire and other areas, rural towns and villages are now being absorbed into new unitary authorities dominated by cities. That will only result in rural areas being more marginalised and left even further behind.