Local Government Finance Settlement

Lord Liddle Excerpts

Thursday 22nd January 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Liddle (Lab)]

My Lords, I declare an interest as a member of Cumbria County Council and congratulate the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Southwark on his moving maiden speech, and Councillor Pinnock—the noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock—on her excellent maiden speech.

I also particularly congratulate my noble friend Lord Beecham on what I thought was a fine and passionate speech. I realise that all Members will not agree with it, but we have to take into account that here we have a Member with 47 years’ experience of local government. I have only 11 and a half years on three different authorities in my time; 47 years can rarely have been matched, particularly in the House of Lords.

The essence of what my noble friend said addresses two really tough questions to the noble Lord, Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon. I fully accept the argument of the noble Baroness, Lady Eaton, that there would have been severe cuts under a Labour Government. The first question is: do the Government believe that their distribution of grants is fair, how do they justify it and how do they avoid the charge of partisanship in the way in which better-off authorities, particularly in the south of England, have been treated? Secondly, instead of scoring cheap points designed to mislead the public about the scale of the local government financial challenge, will the Minister promise to work with local authorities to find ways of protecting essential services at a very difficult time? I will make a particular suggestion in relation to Cumbria.

The situation we face in Cumbria is of forecasting that in the six years starting from 2012-13, all of what was £148 million of revenue support grant will have gone. In total, we have to find £213 million of savings—more than 30% of our budget. We have found £130 million of those already and we have £83 million to go. We think that we have found how to find £53 million of those but there is a black hole of £30 million, which represents a serious threat to essential services in the county. We have been efficient, as the noble Lord, Lord True, said. At its peak, Cumbria County Council had more than 10,000 staff. It now has only 6,800 and there will be another 1,800 redundancies in the next three years, come what may.

However, I had a case in Wigton, which is in my ward on Cumbria County Council, in the last few weeks of an elderly lady who has been looking after her Down’s syndrome son for getting on for 50 years. She can no longer cope. He has dementia and needs to go into a home. There is great difficulty in finding a suitable placement which the authorities can afford. If we cannot do that, we have no right to say that we are a civilised society. We have to find the money for that kind of social help.

In Cumbria, we on the county council think that we could save a huge amount of money if we became a unitary authority. In Cumbria at present, there is a county council, six districts and a national park. There are eight chief executives, eight finance officers and 350 or so councillors to serve a population of half a million people. On top of that, there is an absurd muddle of powers between the different levels. We estimate that £25 million of the £30 million black hole that we need to fill can be saved by creating a unitary authority, but this consensus is extremely difficult to arrive at. It needs a very strong lead from a Government who are prepared to work with authorities rather than rubbish them at every turn. I hope that the Minister will take away from this debate the need not to start a lot of partisan blaming of people for cuts but to start thinking about how the Government can make a real contribution to working with authorities to address the desperate situation in which they find themselves.