Local Authorities: Essential Services

Lord Kennedy of Southwark Excerpts

Thursday 24th January 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Kennedy of Southwark (Lab Co-op)]

My Lords, like other noble Lords, I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Scriven, on securing this most timely debate. I welcome our debating these issues again, which are of such importance to communities. I draw attention to my relevant interests in the register as a vice-president of the Local Government Association. I am grateful to various organisations for providing us with some excellent briefing materials.

Local authorities understand their communities. They deliver essential services every day: everything from refuse collection to housing, fire and rescue services, trading standards and social services, including individual care packages for people. However, as we debate in this Chamber time and again, they are under severe pressure to deliver what is expected of them with the resources they are provided with. I had the privilege of serving on two local authorities, both in London: most recently, on Lewisham Borough Council and, in the 1980s and 1990s, on the council in Southwark, where I grew up. I held a number of positions on Southwark Council: deputy council leader; chair of the finance committee; deputy chief whip; and chair of the highways committee. I have seen and experienced the power of local authorities to make a real difference to their communities. I want to place on record my thanks to councillors, of all political parties and none, for their work and to the staff working in local authorities, who seek to deliver services with considerably reduced resources. I very much concur with the comments made by the noble Lord, Lord Kerslake, in that respect.

The money from central government that has been taken away is of immense proportion. By next year, local authorities will have lost nearly 60p in every pound of central government funding. This leaves an overall funding gap of over £3.1 billion for 2019-20, which is estimated to rise to £8 billion by 2024-25. This pressure places local authorities in very difficult situations. The noble Lord, Lord Kerslake, made some good points about financial stability for local government. It is important that the noble Lord, Lord Bourne of Aberystwyth, responds fully to those points because, as we have heard, councils are now in real difficulty. Indeed, we heard about the case in Northampton, where they are completely collapsing.

Coping with rising demand for key statutory services, such as social care, conflicts with other services relied on by communities, such as street cleaning, cutting the grass, looking after parks or keeping the street lights on. Other pressures, such as where people have no recourse to public funds and present themselves for help and assistance, are placing huge strain on some local authorities. We all know examples of local authorities turning off the street lights at night, not cutting the grass in the local park or asking the community to look after their local green space. In many areas, large parts of the library service have been handed over to the local community to run. We are very lucky that so many members of our communities are prepared to help on a voluntary basis, but we should not operate our services in that way.

The noble Lord, Lord Wallace of Saltaire, highlighted the capacity of communities to replace the local authority delivery of services. That may be possible in Saltaire, but it would not be so easy in other parts of Bradford, where people would struggle; I think that was the point the noble Lord was making. Digressing slightly, the noble Lord also mentioned the TaxPayers’ Alliance and the Institute of Economic Affairs. I often listen to those two organisations giving us the benefit of their advice, but I would be more interested in what they have to say if I knew who funded them. Perhaps we would all be more interested if we lifted the veil of secrecy. That is a matter for them, but perhaps we will find out one day who is behind them. Only time will tell.

Local authorities are having to look carefully at the services they provide. There is no question that discretionary services are under threat in many areas, as statutory services have been protected as far as possible at their expense. The noble Lord, Lord Scriven, referred to the loss of discretionary services and those services that people think they are paying their council tax for. In recent years, we have seen the Government allow councils to increase council tax specifically for social care on top of any other increases they may want to levy. Council tax is a regressive tax: there has been no revaluation of the property bands, as my noble friend Lord Beecham mentioned. It is a wholly unsatisfactory way of collecting money to run council services. We must find a better way of raising local funds for services.

I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Scriven: we need to deliver a proper devolution settlement in England to provide more responsive services. As I have said in this House many times before, the metro mayor patchwork model is odd and is not devolution in any sense at all. We need a situation where funds and powers are properly devolved to a devolved body. The metro mayor model is not the model to deliver that.

On the specific services provided by local authorities, the noble Baroness, Lady Thornhill, rightly highlighted the cumulative impact of spending reductions from a number of different agencies in the public sector, and in the voluntary sector through reductions in grant funding. I agree with her very powerful points about local government funding in general. If the fair funding review takes out or reduces in any way the indicators of deprivation in funding, that would be a disgrace—it would be an unfair funding review, which would make the most vulnerable people in our society suffer even more. We cannot have that.

Adult social care was mentioned many times in the debate. It is an area where demand will increase in future. Medical advances mean that we are all living longer, which is very welcome, but people are living longer with complex care needs. If those are not addressed, people’s quality of life will be dramatically reduced. We cannot have an NHS that responds to all the demands placed on it unless we sort out adult social care. So far, we have seen only a sticking-plaster response from the Government. Can the noble Lord, Lord Bourne of Aberystwyth, tell us where we are with the adult social care Green Paper? We need properly funded adult social care services. The Government got their fingers burned with their ill-thought-out proposals in the 2017 general election, which the Prime Minister had no need to call and is paying the price for at the moment. Adult social care is one area where, given the issues that every Government and every local authority need to tackle and which every community and family will face, it should be possible to agree long-term solutions on funding and service delivery. For me, that includes treating staff with respect. There are dreadful stories of how staff are treated totally unacceptably by some companies in the social care sector.

Children’s services face a funding gap of nearly £1 billion, which is estimated to reach £3.1 billion in 2024-25. Here, again, local authorities are dealing with vulnerable people: children at risk of neglect or being neglected and children at risk of abuse or being abused. I was shocked to read in the Local Government Association briefing note that, every day, social workers open case files for more than 1,000 children, half of which involve suspected abuse or neglect. In the past 10 years, the number of child protection inquires has increased by 158% and the number of children on child protection plans has increased by 84%. Those are truly shocking and shameful figures. The noble Earl, Lord Listowel, spoke with great authority on matters concerning children, young people and families. Early intervention strategies are so important in helping young people to lead better lives and make a better contribution to society. We all win when that is done: the young person, the community and society as a whole.

The noble Lord, Lord Bird, posed important questions about the role of local authorities, the pressure on the NHS and how we can address the issues in today’s debate that concern us all.

The noble Baroness, Lady Randerson, made an excellent contribution focusing largely on bus services. I agree with almost every single word of what she said. The problems with bus services have to be sorted out. As the noble Baroness said, they could be dealt with in one year if the Government changed their political position.

Homelessness is a subject that we have discussed many times before, and here again there is a funding gap of £110 million in 2019-20 which is estimated to rise to £421 million by 2024-25. There is also a human side to the numbers. We live and work in one of the richest countries and richest cities on the planet, and yet last year a homeless man died outside an entrance to the Palace. If you walk from any of the mainline stations such as Charing Cross, Waterloo and Victoria to get to the Palace, you will see homeless people sitting in doorways. Almost every evening you can see hundreds of homeless people waiting opposite Charing Cross station for soup and bread. I am sure that the noble Lord, Lord Bourne, will mention the Homelessness Reduction Act 2017 when he responds to the debate. We all supported the Act, but where we differ is that so far the Government have not provided the funding to enable it to deliver the good work it could do and the changes that it could make.

The noble Lord, Lord Patten, was right to say that we need to build more housing, but as he said, it has to be quality housing built to the best design and environmental standards possible. I often fear that we have not learned the lessons of the 1960s and 1970s in what we are building. One of the most disappointing things is the lack of social housing being built and the lack of money being spent by the Government to bring properties up to decent standards, along with the “affordable rent model”, which in many parts of the country is totally unaffordable. The noble Lord, Lord Best, pointed out that housing has suffered the largest reductions in spending over recent years and that we have serious problems to address. I thought that the points made by the noble Lord about the right to buy were compelling. The original intention of the policy was to enable more people to become home owners, which is perfectly laudable. However, that has long since been lost and instead it has quickly created the problems highlighted by the noble Lord in his contribution.

I note that the Labour Party, the Liberal Democrats and the Conservatives have all been in government in recent years. No matter how much we love our respective parties—and I love the Labour Party very much—we can all say that we have not always got things right. Perhaps only the right reverend Prelate and noble Lords on the Front Benches may be able to get away scot free, but the rest of us must take our fair share of the blame for when we got things wrong. However, we have also got things right. What we should be aiming for is to deal with the many issues of the day that we should agree on: I have mentioned social care, the housing crisis and the scandal of homelessness, the risks to children through neglect or abuse, dealing with criminal landlords and the vital work of trading standards. Given what has to be done, a considerable increase in funding has to be part of the solution.

I concur with the remarks of my noble friend Lord Liddle. I was a member of Southwark Council at about the same time my noble friend was a member of Lambeth Council—I was born in Lambeth, so I have great affection for the borough. I think that we faced similar problems at the time, although we now have a much better situation. I hope all noble Lords will agree that the relationships between local government and national government and those between councils are much better now than they were in the 1980s and 1990s. That is due to my noble friend Lord Beecham, the noble Baroness, Lady Eaton, the noble Lord, Lord Porter of Spalding, and many others who have worked to make that happen. They deserve much credit for that. That work is also being done with London Councils, which is much better than the old London Boroughs Association which was full of Tory councils and the Association of London Authorities which was full of Labour councils. London Councils gives a united voice to London; it is a better and more responsive way to work with government, which I think will be much better for us all.

In conclusion, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Scriven, very much for bringing forward this Motion for debate. I am sure that we will discuss the issues again and again. I also look forward to the response of the noble Lord, Lord Bourne.