Oral Answers to Questions
Debate between Lord Pickles and Andy Slaughter
Mr Pickles
I am very happy to confirm that we have no plans to introduce a family homes tax. The principal problem with the proposal is that, were it to be introduced, the amount raised from those in the top band would be inadequate, so people living in an ordinary home would wake up the day after the election and find themselves in a mansion.
Mr Andy Slaughter (Hammersmith) (Lab)
Will the Secretary of State congratulate Hammersmith and Fulham council on cutting council tax while at the same time abolishing home care charges, cutting the price of meals on wheels by a third and employing more neighbourhood police officers? Does that not make it his favourite council—perhaps even the apple of his eye?
Mr Pickles
I am pleased that the new administration in Hammersmith and Fulham is building on the fine work of the previous Conservative administration, which did more than just freeze council tax; it cut it by 3% each year, from appalling record levels. The new Labour administration has been able to take full advantage of those efficiencies.
Oral Answers to Questions
Debate between Lord Pickles and Andy Slaughter
Mr Andy Slaughter (Hammersmith) (Lab)
Hammersmith and Fulham has increased its take from moving vehicle penalty charge notices by 400% in four years. It raises £2.7 million from one box junction alone, and it says it does this to increase parking revenue, not to improve the movement of traffic. What will the Secretary of State do about Tory councils that rip off motorists?
Mr Pickles
I am shocked to hear this. Hammersmith and Fulham is an exemplary council: not many councils in this country have consistently reduced council tax by 3% every year. I do not think, therefore, that its population is being ripped off, but I shall certainly take a most careful look at the hon. Gentleman’s remarks.
Oral Answers to Questions
Debate between Lord Pickles and Andy Slaughter(12 years, 10 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text
Mr Andy Slaughter (Hammersmith) (Lab)
The chief executive of Hammersmith and Fulham borough council recently retired. Thanks to a pay rise of £11,000 last year, which took his salary to £281,000, the Library calculates that he will receive a pension of £100,000 and a tax-free lump sum of £250,000. When the council is cutting Sure Start by 50%, is this a good use of public money?
Mr Pickles
I am sure that the answer is no. I am pleased that the level of chief executive remuneration has dropped by 14% and that 25% of chief executives have taken a voluntary pay cut. I am also pleased that Hammersmith and Fulham is reducing its council tax for the fourth year running.
Oral Answers to Questions
Debate between Lord Pickles and Andy Slaughter
Mr Pickles
I entirely agree. Chief executives’ pay has got completely out of kilter. There are now 800 local government employees in the top 1% of all earners according to Will Hutton’s figures. With regard to the chief executive of Suffolk, that county does many fine things and is an exemplar authority in many ways, but the chief executive’s refusal to take a pay cut has meant that she has detracted from Suffolk’s many fine achievements.
Mr Andy Slaughter (Hammersmith) (Lab)
Will the Secretary of State look in particular at the case of Mr Nick Johnson, who for the past four years has supplemented his local government ill health retirement pension by being paid £1,000 a day by Hammersmith and Fulham council, so that when he leaves later this year he will have taken almost £1 million from taxpayers? In doing so, will the Secretary of State ignore the fact that the local Conservative party says that Mr Johnson is good value for money, and that he has advised the Tory party on housing policy?
Mr Pickles
I kind of understand that it has never been a glad morning since the hon. Gentleman lost his position as housing chairman at Hammersmith. Frankly, abusing somebody from the safety of this Chamber does him no credit at all.
Local Government Finance
Debate between Lord Pickles and Andy Slaughter(13 years, 9 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text
Mr Andy Slaughter (Hammersmith) (Lab)
Hammersmith and Fulham council is closing nine of its 15 children centres this year, and by doing so it will generate about £2 million in savings. That is part of the £6 million savings in children’s services, which in turn are part of the £13 million savings in social services, which in turn are part of the £27 million that the council aims to save in the coming financial year. The total over the three years is £65 million, or about a third of its budget.
Because of the policies the Secretary of State is pursuing, many councils are having to make unimaginable cuts of this kind. I want to focus on two points in respect of Hammersmith and Fulham council. First, in making those very difficult decisions it has chosen to target the most vulnerable people, and the services that all parties represented in this House say that they wish to be preserved. Secondly, it maintains a charade, with which the Secretary of State has colluded and continues collude, that it is doing this in a new way—that these are new cuts that will not affect front-line services.
In particular—this picks up the point just made by the hon. Member for Wells (Tessa Munt)—the council says that it will pay off debt, and in that way generate revenue income. It says that it will merge back-office services and in that way avoid affecting front-line services. I will break the spell immediately by saying that even if those two ideas—the merger and the disposals to pay off debt—are both successful, which is by no means certain, the total amount of money generated would be about £1 million, or 4% of the total cuts. That is what we are being led to believe is the new way of making cuts.
Before I came to this debate, I had two meetings this afternoon about Sure Start. The first was of an all-party group, to which the Minister with responsibility for children came to speak. He is an honourable man, as well as being an hon. Gentleman, and I believed what he said, which is what I have heard all the Education Ministers repeat. They believe that there is sufficient money to maintain the network of children’s centres and that there is no need to attack their budgets, particularly the phase 1 centres that serve the most vulnerable groups.
That appears to be Government policy, but this is what is happening in Hammersmith and Fulham. First, the closure of the nine centres was announced between Christmas and new year—on page 34 of a report called “Family Support”. Secondly, when that report came up for decision—by that time, thanks to the Daily Mirror and other great organs of state, a lot of the local population had been alerted to the situation—the council said, “You’ve misunderstood what we’re doing. We’re not closing any children’s centres,” but it then proceeded to vote through, on 10 January, the 50% budget cut that meant that those centres had to close. Having made that decision, it then began a consultation process—but that process identifies phase 1 children’s centres, the budget for which is to go down from £473,000 to £19,000. Threats were made to the staff, who were not informed before the closure of their centres was announced in the press. Heads of centres were told that they could not talk to me, or even to the Government, about what was happening.
To her credit, the Minister of State, Department for Education, the hon. Member for Brent Central (Sarah Teather), did say during a Westminster Hall debate that she was concerned about, and was monitoring, what was happening in Hammersmith and Fulham. If the Government want to hold their line on Sure Start, they need to address the situation in Hammersmith and Fulham. It is not just Sure Start centres; youth clubs are closing too. I received a deputation representing 1,000 young people who use a youth club just outside my constituency that is closing, and I am told that all but one of the youth centres will close. Council estates are being demolished.
I went to a meeting at an old people’s home last Friday where, in order to raise £250,000, the air rights over the car park are being sold to a private school next door, so that no light will reach the old people’s home. Some of those old people spend 100% of their time in that home. This is what is happening in a Conservative-controlled council in London at the moment. This is the reality of the “painless” cuts.
Those are the things that we do not hear about in Hammersmith and Fulham. What about the things we do hear about? What about the paying off of debt—that prudent way of reducing debt? That happened on Monday, when, at a meeting of the council’s cabinet—I believe that the Chairman of the Select Committee, my hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield South East (Mr Betts), referred to this earlier—the disposal of nine community buildings was agreed to. Those buildings include four community centres used by more than 100 voluntary groups, all of which will be made homeless, and alternative provision will not be made for them. Those buildings include Palingswick house, an imposing building in central Hammersmith in which 22 voluntary groups occupy space. My right hon. Friend the shadow Secretary of State alluded to one of those earlier: the Afghan refugee group.
Because councils have to produce equality impact assessments when they are booting voluntary organisations out on to the street, Hammersmith and Fulham did that. It produced one for the Iranian Association, which caters mainly for refugees from the oppressive regime in Tehran: the Iranian Association was told that the alternative provision was to go to the Iranian embassy. The Kurdish Association for Refugees is also based in the building, and runs not only a cultural advice centre but a museum—one promoted by Boris Johnson on his tourist trail of London. It was told that the alternative to being booted out on to the street was to go to an organisation for the south Asian population based somewhere in east London. The Afghan refugee association was told that there were two alternative sources of provision for Afghan refugees in London, one was an Afghan restaurant and the other—as my right hon. Friend the Member for Don Valley (Caroline Flint) has already said—was the southern Afghan club, for the promotion of Afghan hounds. That is how my local community in Hammersmith is being treated by a Conservative council.
Three other community centres all came up with viable business plans that would have allowed them to continue operating from their community centres and pay a commercial rent, which would have meant that over a period of two or three years, the council would not have lost money. Without listening any further to those ideas the council voted through the proposal, and all these buildings will be sold off to produce an income of about £500,000 a year. The opportunity cost for the tens of thousands of people who will no longer have those facilities available to them, including the elderly people and the 750 kids from deprived backgrounds who go to dancing classes at one of these places, is unimaginable. But this is what the council is proud of.
The other thing that the council is proud of is the merger with Westminster city council and Kensington and Chelsea borough council, which was announced yesterday. I alluded in an earlier intervention to the Secretary of State’s claim last October—he associated himself with this claim—that the move would save £100 million. When the report was published yesterday, it said that in the dim and distant future—no detail was provided—this would save about £34 million between the three councils. That is already only a third of the sum that was claimed some two to three months ago. The actual quantified savings for next year, between the three councils, was less than £3 million, and the actual sum for Hammersmith and Fulham council was £500,000. That is the big new idea. [Interruption.] I hear the hon. Member for Ealing Central and Acton (Angie Bray) making a sedentary comment. She represents my previous seat, and I always give her credence. She is absolutely right that £500,000 of genuine saving of back-office cost is well worth having, but it is not £27 million, £10 million or £100 million.
That sum is worth having, save for the fact that what those merger proposals envisage is not what hon. Members would like to hear—which is that the savings would come from economies of scale, procurement, and other such administrative matters. We would all support that, but instead the proposals are about creating a new entity that is not Hammersmith and Fulham, not Kensington and Chelsea, and not Westminster. It will be entirely unaccountable to the citizens of any of those boroughs, and it absolutely flies in the face of devolution and localism. No proper risk assessment has been done of the proposal, and £20 million of the notional £35 million will come from cuts in social services. I hate to think about the number of baby Ps that there will be, and the number of elderly people who will be put at risk as a result of these crazy, ill-thought-out and half-baked proposals.
There is no accountability in the arrangement. Two of the authorities have traditionally been Conservative and one has traditionally been Labour. The clear intention is to bind the hands of that authority, so that when it returns to Labour control, as it will doubtless do in three years’ time, it will no longer have jurisdiction over its own spending, because that will be centred in a holding company over which none of the individual councillors has control. Is that really the future of localism in this country? That is the brave new world that the Secretary of State’s favourite council has in store for us.