Oral Answers to Questions
Louise Haigh Excerpts(4 years, 9 months ago)
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Mr Speaker
Order. In calling the hon. Member for Sheffield, Heeley (Louise Haigh), I wish her a very happy birthday.
Louise Haigh (Sheffield, Heeley) (Lab)
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government (Rishi Sunak)
Mr Speaker, I join you in wishing the hon. Lady a very happy birthday—what better way to spend it than at MHCLG questions.
It is the responsibility of each individual local authority to ensure that it can fulfil its statutory care duties. We have, however, supported councils to meet those duties by giving them access to several billion pounds of incremental dedicated funding for this purpose.
Louise Haigh
I am very grateful for those birthday wishes, but I would be even more grateful if the Minister agreed with me that local authorities have a statutory responsibility to ensure that care workers they have commissioned are paid the minimum wage. The all-party parliamentary group on social care has heard increasing evidence that, despite guidance issued by Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs, care workers are still not receiving the minimum wage because they are not paid for travel time in between their contact hours. Will the Minister give me a great birthday present by announcing that he will review the way care workers are paid and that he will ensure they are paid the basic statutory minimum wage?
Rishi Sunak
I thank the hon. Lady for raising this important issue. It is absolutely right that those who are carrying out this vital activity in difficult circumstances get exactly what they are entitled to. I have not seen the report, but I would be delighted to take a look at it later today and to talk to my colleagues at the Department for Education and the Department of Health and Social Care to see what we can do to take this forward.
Local Government and Social Care Funding
Louise Haigh Excerpts(5 years ago)
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Mr Clive Betts (Sheffield South East) (Lab)
As the Chair of the Housing, Communities and Local Government Committee, I think the importance that Select Committees have attached to the issue of social care is shown in the amount of time we spend on inquiries on the issue. We have recently published three reports on adult social care, the last of which was done jointly with the Health and Social Care Committee last year. They were all unanimously agreed by our Committee, and in the latter case by the Committees jointly. We are currently inquiring into children’s social care, with the report due out next week. Those four social care inquiries show how important the issue is for the Committee and for local government as a whole.
As a Sheffield MP, I have to comment on the fact that my city and constituency have received funding cuts that are far higher than the average percentage in the past nine years, since 2010. Like other northern cities, we have been disproportionately hit, as cities with the greatest problems and needs have seen the Government cut their grants by the biggest percentage.
Putting all that to one side, if I look at the wider context, I see real problems for local government, because as a whole local government has had bigger cuts by percentage than any other area of Government spending. That has united councils of all political persuasions in their concerns about the unfair effect those spending cuts have had on local government as a whole. This comes at a time when demand for the main local authority services—care services—has been rising. The number of elderly people has been growing, which has meant that the number of elderly people who need care has been growing. That is great, because people are living longer. The number of people of working age with disabilities—an element of care that we should not forget—has also been growing, which is another success. In percentage terms, the demand for children’s services is going up faster than demand for any other current aspect of local government spending, so that comes on top of what I have described, too.
Those three rising demands mean that despite the fact that more people are in need of elderly care, according to Age Concern some 1.5 million people are not getting it. The threshold has been raised such that people with lower and moderate needs are now excluded from the care systems. People are ending up in hospital who should not be there because prevention is not happening, and people in hospital are not being discharged as quickly as they should be. We see all these things happening as a result.
The pressures on social care are causing other issues. With rising demand and spending on social care, as the cake has shrunk, the proportion of it spent on social care has grown, so the amount spent on other services has proportionately been cut by even more. The National Audit Office has done the figures, and they were given to the Select Committee: cultural and related services have seen a 35% cut; highways services and transport have seen a 37% cut; housing services, including homelessness and private sector housing, have seen a 45% cut; environmental and regulatory services have been cut by 16%; and planning has been cut by 50%. Those are massive cuts to the basic services on which we all rely day to day.
I worry about all that, because although it is of course important that councils concentrate on care, most people in the country do not receive care for themselves or for people in their families on a daily, regular basis; they rely on other services. They are seeing their council tax bills rise and what they get for their money fall. That is a real challenge and problem for local democracy. People are paying more but not getting any more. We ought to be very concerned about that indeed. It needs to be addressed in the widest sense.
I refer to the comments made by Councillor Paul Carter, but people from the Local Government Association, the County Councils Network, the District Councils’ Network, London Councils, and SIGOMA, the special interest group of municipal authorities, have made similar comments. Every council organisation has said that the current situation simply cannot continue and that we need a fundamental change in the amount of money provided for local government in the next spending review. The Select Committee will do an inquiry into that, which will hopefully give Ministers the ammunition with which to badger and berate the Treasury when they have discussions at that level.
We know from the estimates, which no one from the Government has challenged, that by the end of the next spending review children’s services are likely to be £3 billion adrift of the funding they need. Social care for the elderly is already £2 billion adrift, with estimates that the average annual increase required to keep pace with demand is around £800,000. That takes us to around £7 billion adrift.
The quality of care is often forgotten about. We need not only to continue to meet the increase in demand, but to do something to improve quality. If demand is going to increase, we are going to have to recruit more staff, and if we recruit more staff, we are going to have to pay them and train them better, otherwise, we will not be able to retain them. So the costs are going to go up even further.
Louise Haigh (Sheffield, Heeley) (Lab)
I speak as a co-chair of the all-party group on social care. Next week, we are launching an inquiry into the professionalisation of the social care workforce. My hon. Friend is making an important point about recruitment and retention and the need for more funding. The pressures and demands on funding are leading to a reduction in the professionalisation of the workforce, and as a result to reductions in the quality of care.
Mr Betts
Absolutely. The joint Committee report made the point that the quality of care is so important, and we have to think about the quality of the workforce and how much we pay them. The average social care worker gets paid 29% less than someone doing a similar job in the NHS. That figure demonstrates the challenge that we face.
What are we looking at, then? We have recently had a few welcome sticking plasters of funding from the Government; but next time, we will need a very large bandage, not just a few sticking plasters, to put this issue right. We look forward to the Green Paper, at some point on the horizon. Perhaps the Minister can tell us about the timing for that when she replies, but even now time is now too short for there to be a fundamental change in funding arrangements. We are going to need a lot more of the same.
The two Select Committees recommended that, at the funding review, we take the £7 billion extra that will be in the local government system from the 75% business rates retention and, instead of using it to replace public health grants and other forms of grant, we put it back into the system to deal with the problems of social care. That money can be there and we will not have to change the system. That can be done. We also proposed changes to make the council tax system fairer and less regressive. We can do those things for the next spending review and make sure that a quantum of money—around £7 billion— is available for social care. That would then relieve the pressure on other council services.
We then looked at what the longer-term system should look like. Of course, we need better integration at a local level between the NHS and social care. This is not about a national system of care that replaces what local authorities do; it is about better integration at local level. We must bear in mind that, while it is important that the health service and social care are linked together, the other great join-up that we must have is between housing and social care. The majority of people receiving social care live in their own home, and it is vital that we get those services linked as well.
Permitted Development and Shale Gas Exploration
Louise Haigh Excerpts(5 years, 1 month ago)
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Louise Haigh (Sheffield, Heeley) (Lab)
It is a great pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Wells (James Heappey). The Government are considering bypassing local authorities entirely and removing the need for planning permission for fracking, because fracking has little or no support in our communities. Ministers have been hypnotised by the success story in the United States, without considering the critical difference between the US and the UK, which is that the US has vast tracts of low-density land that it can exploit. For fracking to be a viable part of our energy mix in the UK, two things are necessary—tracts of land with low population, and broad-based community support—but we have neither.
The Bowland shale gasfield, which is by far the most sizeable in the UK, is where the viability of fracking will live or die. It covers land from Lancaster in the north to Sheffield in the south and Whitby in the north-east. One well—just one—has been introduced to that basin, in the teeth of opposition, and even that has lain dormant for many months due to tremors. The gasfield covers almost all the major metropolitan centres of the north of England: Liverpool, Manchester, Preston and, on the right side of the Pennines, Derby, Sheffield, York and north Leeds. It is an absurdity that the Government think that a fracking basin that covers a population that runs into many millions is viable.
Rather than recognise those inherent flaws, which are caused by trying to impose an industry with a dubious environmental record on a highly populated sweep of land, the Government are instead trying to override the local population entirely. If communities cannot exercise their democratic right to oppose fracking through the planning system, how can the Government maintain the presence of localism? There is no broad consent for fracking in the way that there often is for other uses of the national infrastructure projects regime.
Rosie Cooper
Will my hon. Friend acknowledge that it was the elected members on Lancashire County Council who voted not to have fracking at Preston New Road, and that it is the Government who turned their back on those people—my constituents? Despite all their nods to localism, what the Government are saying is that localism and local opinion is well and truly buried.
Louise Haigh
My hon. Friend is absolutely right. There can be no pretence to localism when the Government are riding roughshod over the voices and rights of local authorities and local people, not least because of the documented seismicity risks. Since October last year the Preston New Road operation has triggered three red level tremors and 57 earthquakes, not to mention the risk to aquifers. Denying the local community a meaningful say is utterly anti-democratic and perverse.
It is not too late for the Government to rethink their approach and recognise that the obstacles they find in their way should not just be bulldozed through inappropriate legislation. At a fundamental level, the prospects for an advanced shale gas industry in the UK are completely and utterly flawed.
Several hon. Members rose—
Rough Sleeping
Louise Haigh Excerpts(5 years, 2 months ago)
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Neil Coyle
Sadly, my hon. Friend is right to be nervous. Of course, I gave way to the chair of the parliamentary Labour Party in the hope that he might call me in a debate at some point. Southwark was one of the earliest test areas for universal credit. My experience is that my hon. Friend will have more cases of rough sleeping as a result of the universal credit roll-out.
The 2% drop nationally comes with very significant variances. There was a massive 60% jump in rough sleeping in Birmingham. In Manchester, I believe it was about 31%, and 13% in London. There were not such high numbers overall, but there were statistically significant jumps in areas such as Doncaster, where rough sleeping is three and a half times what it was just a year ago. In Rugby, there is five times as much, and in Corby there is seven times as much, albeit from low bases. Those anomalies need addressing. The towns and cities with large rises need more significant attention. I hope that the Minister will address that.
I want to highlight areas that are doing better than others. Brighton has reduced rough sleeping by two thirds; Luton has almost cut it in half and Bedford has cut it by about a third. Some areas are doing better, and I hope that their perhaps better practice is extended. My own council has bucked the London rise of 13%. There were just three additional rough sleepers in Southwark last year, and it is leading work to train staff in other local authorities to implement the Homelessness Reduction Act 2017.
Louise Haigh (Sheffield, Heeley) (Lab)
I congratulate my hon. Friend on securing this debate. I have been out with the police in Lancashire and Kent and have seen their joint agency approach to tackling homelessness. Does he agree that a whole-system approach is necessary, and does he share my concern that some police forces still use the Vagrancy Act 1824 to criminalise rough sleepers without giving them the support they clearly need?
Neil Coyle
My hon. Friend is absolutely right. I know she does a huge amount on policing. The police should not be picking up the pieces of failing systems elsewhere. That is an avoidable drain on their resources.